Dark Twilight

An American mythologist, professor, and paranormal investigator returns to China where he taught for many years with the ashes of Geraldine, a Chinese lady-friend who died in his country. Upon returning, he, Dr. Harper Paget, decides to accept contracts and start teaching in universities in the northeast of China. He meets new colleagues and students, one named Marilyn who is interested in him but from whom he distances himself before the situation becomes more complicated. He arrives at a new university where he meets Dr. Brady Simon, a media professor from Canada.

When the two become friends, Harper learns that Brady recently lost his wife in an accident in China and has decided to exchange SMSs with ladies in the Philippines. Harper warns him about this, but Brady continues and meets an apparently pleasant young woman named Bella. Later, Brady learns about a supernatural creature from the Philippines called an aswak. Harper wonders if such a creature is linked to the kuntilanak, creatures from Indonesia whom he had to fight against not only in China before but in his own country. Harper feels that these Kuntilanak are actually the Lamiae from ancient Greece in disguise, entities who his ancestors have been struggling with for generations..

Harper meets Anjani at the new university, a graduate student from Indonesia who tells him about the very human problems in her country. He also meets Xue, a young Chinese lady who works for the Foreign Affairs Office. After helping him to collect Christabel from the train station, she vanishes. Christabel was Harper's love interest in the past who gave him up for a French friend but who now keeps in contact with him, mainly by SMSs. Before Xue disappears from the campus, she reports having seen Harper from a distance at night with a woman who does not look completely human.

While Anjani and Harper become friends and even lovers, Brady has some unpleasant conflicts with the ladies in the Philippines, some of them having to do with money and one of them involving threats. Across from the courtyard from where Harper's dorm building is the dorm for the the female students. Some of them watch him from windows. Harper watches them in return. even though a growing sense of foreboding seizes him.

Who is the real kuntilanak who endangers his life and the life of his Canadian friend? Whose attack puts him in a wheelchair where he awaits a further confrontation? Is it Anjani, Xue, Christabel, Marilyn (who writes that she wants to visit him at his new campus), or even one of the ladies from across the courtyard? Harper has been in danger before, but now he cannot even trust his cell phone messages.