The town known as Chaos, and the spectral lands of the surrounding territory, come by the name 'chaos' honestly-and horrifically. Unparalleled incidents inspire memories of primordial terrors. Six victims are slaughtered at the Territorial Hospital in Phoenix. Five are patients, the sixth is an orderly. While still alive, the patients all complained of the same terrifying dreams of an inescapable fate. The worker-killed in the same gruesome fashion as the others-has no connection to them except he that he worked there. Amazingly, a seventh person, yet another orderly, is rendered unconscious, but spared the grisly death. A hundred miles away, in the mining town of Chaos, Matthew Sandstrom, an agent of the U.S. government, struggles to understand the strange things he is experiencing. They seem impossible and yet, were witnessed by several other people, who are equally baffled. Part of the town's new police force, Sergeant Timothy Erickson is tasked with investigating singular incidents witnessed in Chaos: a job he feels unequal to following to completion. Deep inside the earth, under the streets of the town, miners struggle against mind-numbing labor and the insidious effects of unseen forces withal. Tempers are short. Men speak of having weird dreams- visions. Violence escalates, including sudden, unexplained suicides. Mine owners and officials fear their precious investments may be endangered as the miners threaten work stoppages. A crack team of strike-breakers from the famous Pinkerton Agency in Chicago are called in, with disastrous results. Twenty five miles west of the town, a young ethnographer is studying the extraordinary practices of the native people who inhabit Su'mok Mesa. What he finds persuades him they are even more bizarre than previously thought. A chance encounter has him questioning everything he thinks he knows and soon he is running for his life and to preserve his sanity. Madness, violence, and terror, stride across the land known as Territorial Arizona unchecked, all arising from the shadowed town of Chaos.