Mission Lead Olivia O’Connor and her team from the Artemis Corporation, along with their military liaison, are in the final preparations for an undertaking that will alter the course of human history: a test flight that promises to open up new frontiers in the expanse of the universe. But their journey between dimensions is one they never trained for. Strange voices in the corridors. Long lost faces not forgotten. Strange symbols carved into the hull. And gathering outside the ship, ancient forces beyond reckoning.

Teenager Edie Hudson was nobody’s little darling, which made vanishing all too easy. Two decades later, she’s been forgotten by everyone except her mother, Samantha. And the person who knows what happened to her. Samantha has had a long time to remember, and to regret. Having seen how little her daughter mattered to the community in the months following her disappearance, she wonders if Edie was lost before she was even gone. Or was it guilt, not indifference, that made the locals turn a blind eye? When she meets Frances, she at last starts to hope for answers.

Single mother Elodie’s life has become a fairy tale. She’s met Bren, equal parts Golden-retriever-devoted and sinfully handsome. He’s whisked her and her autistic son, Jude, to the crumbling family house he’s renovating. She has a new husband, a new house, and a new baby on the way. Everything is perfect. Until Jude claims he can hear voices in the walls. He says their renovations are “hurting” the house. Even Elodie can’t ignore it—something strange is going on.

The small town of Riverwood, Minnesota is true to its name, brimming with beautiful scenes of nature. Its rural landscape is threaded with scenic trout streams, which carve their way through limestone bluffs. But beneath its picturesque facade, danger runs rampant. Clay Hawkins isn’t a stranger to the secrets of his hometown. After twenty years away, Clay has recently returned home from abroad with his twelve-year-old son Braedon, and his relationship with his father Judd, the recently replaced sheriff, is as strained as ever.

In the 1950s, the field of psychiatry had nothing to show for itself. While polio was being cured, antibiotics were being discovered, and cancer research was developing, the mental health world had no wins. Asylums were full and nobody had figured out how to fix insanity—specifically schizophrenia, the severest mental illness. Scientists became convinced that if they could engineer a pill to create madness, then they could cure it.