``Howard's characters, relentless imagination, twisting plotlines, and use of language make the Johannes Cabal series a real pleasure to read, and The Fear Institute is the best Cabal yet.`` --Richard Kadrey, author of the Sandman Slim series Beyond the wall of sleep lies the Dreamlands. For countless millennia, they have been explored only by those philosophers, mystics, and poets with a certain detachment from mundane reality. Well, those halcyon days are over, beatniks. Johannes Cabal is coming. Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, is employed by the mysterious Fear Institute to lead an expedition into the Dreamlands to hunt and destroy the dread Phobic Animus, the very source of all the world's fear. Along the way, they will encounter witches, vile abominations, and far too many zebras. And, when they finally come close to their goal, Cabal will have to face his own nightmares. But for a man who communes easily with devils and the dead, surely there is nothing left to fear. . . .