Polluted sands filled with hidden traps and treasures. A magic-scarred wasteland where mighty battles were once fought but which is now home to only crumbling ruins and living nightmares. A harsh, alien landscape where battered individuals with little hope risk their lives to salvage metal and other objects from a terrain riddled with creatures like the nagra who will swallow a man whole and then use its victim as a living battery for decades. This is the brutal setting for Sendrowski's well-written novel of a world struggling to survive in the aftermath of self-induced apocalypse.

Michael has been making a few coins selling water from a secret cistern when a plunderer suddenly strips him of his livelihood and almost his life. After barely escaping, the youth soon finds himself part of a clean-up campaign headed into the Culver Waste. Although the pay promises to keep starvation at bay, the job itself could easily prove fatal. Still, Michael's situation provides him with few other options, and perhaps he will find something valuable in the waste that he can smuggle back with him to camp. But when Michael stumbles upon a brass urn in an underground lair, will his find lead him to money or madness?

Sendrowski is highly skilled at creating mood and atmosphere. His planet is populated with horrors that would make even H.P. Lovecraft shudder but also with characters, whether normal human or something else entirely, that have emotions and motivations that are both real and identifiable. Gritty and often violent, his novel is the perfect escape for those who enjoy dark fantasy.

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