Why God Unleashed These Beasts Upon Us

Earth is a purgatory. Souls pass through it on the way to heaven or hell, and a place people are only passing through was built to supress everything — no magic, no power, no way for a man to become more than a man. That was the design.

The trouble is what comes through from the other side. Things out of magical worlds, wearing kind faces. Curses that catch in ordinary men. Old, patient, hungry things that wake up one small town at a time. God made every one of them, and then He left, and left them here with us.

Aldous Krane has spent twenty years cleaning up after that. Badge in one pocket, a rosary in the other he won't talk about. He'll say it plain: God walked out on His own creatures, and burying them is still God's work, and a man doesn't have to forgive the Almighty to do it.

His new partner is twenty-three and still thinks the answers are in the manual.

They start in a Pennsylvania town where thirty-four people are dead, every certificate says natural causes, and nobody will say a word about the kind old man at the diner counter — because before each of them died, their family came into a little luck.There's no magic on Earth, and there was never supposed to be. It's a waiting room — a place souls pass through on the way to somewhere they'll stay. Nothing here is built to grow. A man lives, and dies, and is only ever a man.
But Earth sits close to the other side, and things get through. Some of them crossed over from worlds where magic is as common as weather. Some started out as ordinary men and caught something they couldn't put down. They come quiet, and they come patient, and they don't look like anything you'd run from — a kind old man at a diner counter, a doctor who never loses a patient, a child everybody in town has grown fond of. They settle in, and people start to die, and the paperwork always says natural causes.
That's what the Order is for. Somebody has to know what killed these people, and somebody has to put the thing that did it back in the ground.
Aldous Krane has done that work for twenty years. He carries a badge in one pocket and a rosary in the other he won't talk about, and if you ask him he'll tell you straight: God made these things, and then God left, and left them here among people who can't fight back. Krane doesn't forgive Him for it. He just does the job, because the job is God's, and a man doesn't have to forgive the Almighty to do His work.
His new partner is twenty-three, three generations of family already on the chapterhouse wall, and still sure the answers are all in the manual he studied. He's going to learn otherwise.
Some of the things they hunt lie to you. The worst ones never have to. One of them keeps every promise it makes. One of them is a child. And one of them, in time, will ride in the back seat of Krane's car and help him hunt the rest.
Not all of them can be beaten. Not everyone gets saved. And every time Krane buries one, he's a little more certain the answer to the only question that matters — why God unleashed these beasts upon us — is worse than no answer at all.