Professor Mandrake Smith would be unrecognisable to his former colleagues now, but the shambling, drink-addled former Professor of Anthropology at Oxford is now barely surviving in Morecambe. Here he has many things to forget, although some don't want to forget him. Plagued by the nightmares of his past, both in Oxford and Papua New Guinea, he finds himself dragged into a morass of supernatural activity centered around the deposition of filleted corpses in the ancient rock-cut graves at St. Patrick's Chapel, Heysham Head. Unwillingly drafted into helping the enigmatic Mr Thorn, he grudgingly assists in trying to stop the downward spiral into darkness and insanity that awaits Morecambe, and then the entire world...