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Tommy Phan is a thirty-year-old Vietnamese-American detective novelist living in Southern California, and a chaser of the American dream.
He drives home his brand-new Corvette one day to discover a strange doll on his doorstep.
It's rather like a rag doll, but is covered entirely with white cloth, having no face or hair or clothes, little more than a doll blank.
Where the eyes should be, there are two crossed stitches of black thread.
Five sets of crossed black stitches mark the mouth, and another pair form an X over the heart.
He brings it into the house. That night, he hears an odd little popping sound and looks up to see the crossed stitches breaking over the doll's heart.
When he picks the doll up, he feels something pulsing in it's chest.
Another thread unravels to reveal a reptilian green eye - not a doll's eye, because it blinks.
Tommy Phan pursues the thing as it scrambles away into his house - and then is pursued by it as it evolves from a terrifying and vicious minikin into a hulking and formidable opponent bent on killing him.
The deadline is dawn, the creature types on Tommy's computer screen, and in the hours that follow, with the help of a beautiful, strangely intuitive waitress he meets on the highway, Tommy frantically flees this fierce enemy, desperate to discover what this thing is and why it's pursuing him.
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Out of a cloudless sky on a windless November day came a sudden shadow that swooped across the bright aqua Corvette.
Tommy Phan was standing beside the car, in pleasantly warm autumn sunshine, holding out his hand to accept the keys from Jim Shine, the salesman, when the fleeting shade touched him. He heard a brief thrumming like frantic wings.
Glancing up, he expected to glimpse a sea gull, but not a single bird was in sight.
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