The town of Furnace is an odd place set in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains, filled with upscale homes. It is an affluent community with no visible means of support.
Grey takes about forty pages to set up the main character, Josh Spiller, and his situation in life. He’s a cross country trucker with a live-in girlfriend. His girlfriend is pregnant and doesn’t want to keep the baby. They fight. Josh leaves on a trucking job. As he’s driving, he decides that he wants to get a coffee and some food, but doesn’t want to go to McDonalds. So he turns off the highway onto a road that leads him straight into Furnace.
While driving through the town, Josh accidentally runs over a baby stroller with baby on board. He is devastated by and insists that he saw a woman push the stroller into the road in front of him. The Chief of Police tries to dissuade him, tries to convince Josh that it is just a tragic accident, that nobody pushed the baby stroller. The infant’s mother says she forgot to set the stroller’s parking brake. Although the Chief clears Josh of any wrong doing, Josh can’t let go of the idea that a woman, not the baby’s mother, pushed the stroller. The reader knows he should just let it go and get out of town, but Josh is a man of integrity and he wants his story on the record. This stubbornness, of course, sets him up for what follows. He doesn’t leave until the police basically throw him out of town.
Scattered with passages hinting about evil generated by both demons and humans, the book becomes increasing terrifying. On the way out of town, Josh picks up a hitchhiker named Griffin. That’s a huge hint. A griffin is part lion part eagle with the talons of an eagle. Talons that are strong enough to shred the roof of the truck trailer.
Josh has an affair with Griffin, but she is gone in the morning. In his truck, he finds a piece of something that looks like parchment on which is written the words “Five Days Alive Permitted.” He has no idea what that means, but he begins to feel that he is being watched and people begin to shy away from him. Griffin shows up again and tells him that unless he can get someone else to willingly take the parchment from him, he will die.
The story builds slowly. The first one hundred plus pages were interesting, the story was sad, but not scary. Then I hit page one hundred thirty-five and my jaw dropped. Suddenly, I was very unsettled, nervous, and shall I say it: scared. I had been reading, at night, alone in the house, in my office. The rest of the house was dark. As I read the next fifteen pages I became increasingly unnerved. I slept with the lights on that night. This type of fright is a five on the one-to-five scary scale, five being scariest.
The building action culminates in extreme happenings. The ending is beautiful, but the lights in my house stayed on for a few more nights.