The Hope is a vast ocean liner, five miles long and two miles wide and one mile high, which lurches through the waves on a voyage to nowhere, carrying a million passengers in her rusting belly. After some thirty years at sea, everyone aboard her has gone just a little bit loopy, and violent death has become a way of life. All sorts of horrors lurk in the ship's darkest corners – rumours made flesh, unspeakable creatures, peripheral-vision insanities. The only certainty is this: the Hope, which was once a multimillionaire philanthropist's dream, has become a floating nightmare.