In this collaborative omnibus-style fiction project, four writers navigate the protean concept of the “bargain” in novella-length stories. The lives of a biographer surveying the career of a “haunted” literary figure, a lovelorn journalist entering into a diabolic covenant, a tourist attempting to stay sober through her holiday travels, and a doctor’s complicity in a colonial scandal, stand side to side within this macro-narrative of interlocking themes. These horror-inflected offerings of existential dread, tainted pasts, and uncertain futures serve as an unbalancing reminder that there is always a high price to pay for the corruption of the soul.