A nighttime encounter on the country road: The strangely agitated man with many tattoos is not exactly reassuring. And then those tattoos begin to move. From this, the stories of the book emerge, telling of other worlds: of love and imagination on Mars, of madness in the eternal rain of Venus, of lonely death in the infinite space between the stars, and of the towns and villages in our own world, where strange things happen that we never notice, and where strange beings live that we never encounter.