Web of Evil #1

In the sweltering shadows of the Everglades, a group of Miami gangsters seeking refuge with a kidnapped girl uncover a swamp teeming with horrors—zombies and a monstrous crocodile. As tensions rise between the criminals and the supernatural forces, the lives of Melissa Harraby, George, Sandy, Ernie, Nick, Pete, and Ellsworth Harraby become entangled in a deadly game of survival. The past, embodied by Mr. Harraby’s haunting flashback, begins to bleed into the present, and the only thing certain is that something ancient and hungry is watching from the water’s edge.

Emil Lorenz, the cruel proprietor of a carnival freak show, pushes his grotesque performers—The Snake-Man, The Giraffe-Man, and The Mule-Man—to their limits. After setting fire to them to claim insurance and build an amusement park, he begins to see them in the shadows, their twisted forms returning from the flames.

In the quiet hush of a cemetery, undertaker Horace Vennery prowls the graves under cover of night, stealing from the dead with cold precision—until a sudden cave-in traps him, and the silence is broken by the frantic scrabble of rats. With Mrs. Ruperts and Egbert Madison watching from the shadows, the line between the living and the buried begins to blur.

Simon Fenton, the ambitious understudy, seizes his moment when the star actor Jason Worthington falls dead—only to find himself haunted by Worthington’s ghost, who insists on a night-long rehearsal of Hamlet’s final scene. As the hours stretch into madness, Fenton’s exhaustion deepens, trapped in a performance he never wanted to stage.