Refuge, New Hampshire, is a small town. The kind found on postcards. Their biggest concern is the rowdy summertime revelers making their way up from Massachusetts and New York. And with most of the town's residents in neighboring Ashland, for the Fourth of July fireworks show, Refuge is quieter than usual. That is, until the Baptist church's bell starts ringing - on its own.
The bell chimes faster and faster, reaching a frenetic pace, as though rung by the Devil himself. But the bell is just the beginning. The air shimmers. The night-time sky fills with a burning red aurora. The moon, previously a crescent, is now full. And just hours after dusk, the sun returns to the sky, revealing an endless desert where there was once a mountainous pine forest.
Led by ex-Army Ranger turned surrealist painter, Griffin Butler, Sheriff Rebecca Rule and her deputy, Helena Frost, the residents of Refuge must weather an ever changing onslaught of otherworldly dangers while trying to uncover how and why the landscape beyond town shifts every time the church bell tolls.
As a sequence of horrific events threaten to destroy the town, the residents must band together, search for answers and find a way to defend their homes, or Refuge will be lost.

When I first found this Omnibus of 5 separate authors (actually 4 since Jeremy Bishop is also Jeremy Robinson) writing 5 separate books, I figured it might not turn out that well and I would regret buying it. I had never read anything by any of the authors and I don't tend to veer often from my favorites, but I was riding the "boredom train" and so decided to give it a go. I could not have been any further from correct in my initial assumption.

This omnibus works. I liked the entire thing, each segment was engaging and I enjoyed each writer. There wasn't any one part I felt lacked or was poorly written. There were a few small moments, mainly in dialogue style, where I could tell somebody different was writing, but as a whole, the entire story was consistent and flowed well.

The story really begins to come together toward the middle to end of Book 4 when some of the mystery is revealed, but the first three books are also used to help establish the characters so that by the end of Book 5 I found I really cared about the characters and what was going to happen to them.

The whole Omnibus is around 500 pages and the reading is pretty easy. I would recommend giving it a go if you like mild to medium horror (a few minor hellish apocalyptic type images but no graphic gore, murder, rape, etc.) mixed with a bit of fantasy, conspiracy and mystery. There is a good sense throughout the books that everybody in Refuge has a little something to hide and nobody is quite telling the entire truth about themselves or what they know.

I enjoyed it and look forward to maybe trying some of the authors, if not all, in the future at some point.

Also, extra points to Jeremy Bishop, because he seems like a real cool guy on his website and when I left a message on his site about how much I liked Refuge, he actually responded and thanked me for purchasing it. It appeared he was trying to respond to all the messages. It looks like he's an author who really digs his fans and isn't full of himself.