TICKTOCK

Tommy Phan is a thirty-year-old Vietnamese-American 
detective novelist living in Southern California, 
and a chaser of the American dream. He drives home 
his brand-new Corvette one day to discover a 
strange doll on his doorstep. It's rather like a 
rag doll, but is covered entirely with white cloth, 
having no face or hair or clothes, little more than 
a doll blank. Where the eyes should be, there are 
two crossed stitches of black thread. Five sets of 
crossed black stitches mark the mouth, and another 
pair form an X over the heart.

He brings it into the house. That night, he hears 
an odd little popping sound and looks up to see the 
crossed stitches breaking over the doll's heart. 
When he picks the doll up, he feels something 
pulsing in it's chest. Another thread unravels to 
reveal a reptilian green eye--not a doll's eye, 
because it blinks. Tommy Phan pursues the thing as 
it scrambles away into his house--and then is 
pursued by it as it evolves from a terrifying and 
vicious minikin into a hulking and formidable 
opponent bent on killing him.

THE DEADLINE IS DAWN, the creature types on Tommy's 
computer screen, and in the hours that follow, with 
the help of a beautiful,strangely intuitive 
waitress he meets on the highway, Tommy frantically 
flees this fierce enemy, desperate to discover what 
this thing is and why it's pursuing him.