"Plush Head" by Vlad Raiber, summary Automatic translate

This book is an anthology of frightening urban legends, written in the form of personal diaries and notes. It was created in 2023. The most important detail about this book is that the disparate stories are united by a common plot about a parallel world and its eerie inhabitants, which paranormal researcher Artur Glagolev attempts to study. The author has constructed a dark universe where the supernatural coexists with everyday reality.

In 2025, Vlad Raiber won the Eksmo.Debut award with this collection.

The Notes of Artur Glagolev and the Story of a Monster from the Dark

Artur Glagolev is morbidly obsessed with finding answers about a parallel dimension. Hums — doppelgangers of ordinary people — inhabit it. His girlfriend, Marty, has blocked his contact information, avoiding painful memories of a nightmare she experienced. She wrote to him, "I don’t want to think about your hums!" The lonely seeker collects other people’s notes, which contain terrible secrets about creatures from other realities. The first text tells of a demoness with pale skin, buck teeth, and long claws. The creature is terrified of light, dwells in the shadows, hides under stairs, and haunts anyone who learns its name.

As a child, the diary’s author heard about this evil spirit from homeless people warming themselves on heating pipes. The monster tore apart his school friend when the boys went exploring the unfinished brick stands of a stadium. The monster returned for the adult protagonist years later, stalking him through the dark corridors of a high-rise building. An acquaintance of the boy’s named Anya, who studied psychology, wanted to cure him of his nyctophobia and paid with her life when she overconfidently walked into an unlit maple park. The police attributed her death to an attack by stray dogs. Realizing the nocturnal predator’s vulnerability to publicity, the protagonist asks for rumors to be spread about it, hoping that fame will weaken the monster. Artur Glagolev leaves a note, reporting the author officially missing.

Lost passengers

The next part, recorded by an adventurer named Vitya, reveals the secret of a rusty train car at an abandoned train station. Local teenagers dubbed the area a train graveyard. Dark rumors circulated about a ghostly conductor haunting the train, demanding tickets from random passengers. Teenagers Vitya, Spartak, Karina, and Kristina climb into the car through the broken glass of a restroom.

Inside, the interior looks remarkably new, free of dust and debris. Spartak jokingly suggests playing a prank on his friends, but suddenly, a woman’s voice calls him out into the hallway and vanishes without a trace. Vitya searches the compartment and notices a frantic woman’s face with a frozen smile in the murky window. The remaining friends disperse home in panic. That night, Vitya receives a phone call from his missing comrade. Spartak, over the increasing rumble of the wheels, says in a muffled whisper, "They took me away into such darkness…"

The Cursed Store

An old Voskhod notebook, published in 1979 and stained with wood shavings and drops of blood, falls into Arthur’s hands. Thirteen-year-old Pioneer Alyosha Petrov discovers a strange radio and toy store in a closed brick building with massive iron doors. The hulking manager, with a disfigured pink hand resembling soft jelly, gives the boy a rare model airplane for free. At home, Alyosha discovers a horrific substitution: the plastic toy has turned into two dead birds.

On a return visit, the teenager notices new, frightening objects in the sales area. He sees the skeleton of an unknown predator, a green vinyl record with a funeral march, and a transparent container containing severed children’s heads. The pioneer guesses the warehouse’s true cursed nature, but the manager, with a sagging rubber face, blocks the exit. The man forces the child to sign an employment contract in blood, rips off the head of a teddy bear, and sews it onto the boy. Arthur, who has been watching the mysterious building for several hours on a rainy night, personally sees the kidnapped pioneer with the bear’s head. The poor fellow still lights his way with an old kerosene lantern and delivers things to the creepy owner.

Parasites from the graves

Another voluminous diary was written by fourteen-year-old Slava in the summer of 2004. The young man is deeply distressed by the sudden death of schoolboy Dima Valsov, whose funeral he witnessed by chance at the city cemetery. Later that night, in a deep sleepwalking state, Slava takes a garden shovel and digs up the teenager’s grave. Soon, a living corpse in a dirt-smeared jacket begins to creep into his apartment. Dima’s body has been taken over by a parasitic polychaete larva, a Nectochaete. These ancient creatures use children’s corpses to get to living teenagers.

The rotting monster persuades Slava to voluntarily surrender his physical form, as it is impossible to take root without the victim’s consent. The enormous larva systematically drives the young man mad, sending enormous metal beetles into his bedroom, reading his mind, and instilling profound despair. In the park, Slava meets a lonely peer, Vanya. Vanya is being stalked by another Nectochaete, in the form of a dead girl in a dirty lace dress. The friends agree to fight the parasites together, despite their fatigue. Slava catches the monster in a lie, realizing it is merely manipulating his negative fears, and flatly refuses to give in. By the end of August, the exhausted insect-like creature dies, never having found a new host.

Endless flight

Artur Glagolev suspects close surveillance by government agents and a pioneer with a plush head. The desperate searcher heads to a train car in the train graveyard. There he finds a scribbled notebook on a spring. The scattered notes belong to random passengers, forever trapped on the cursed train. The train moves nonstop past the same haunted view from the window, complete with fog and an empty water tower.

Fyodor, who traveled in the spring of 1996, tells of the disappearance of fellow passengers and the daily mystical restoration of the consumed supplies of fried chicken and bread. At night, a mad, blue-faced conductor stalks the train corridors, trying to capture surviving passengers. In June 1988, driver Nadezhda Vorontsova sees a translucent Spartak and breaks a window with a hammer to escape. Spartak, who boards the train in the summer of 2021, realizes the terrible truth. All the missing are in the same space, but forever separated into different layers of time. Weakened by hunger and thirst, he hears the howling of dozens of voices and calls on future victims to save themselves. Artur hands over the collected materials to the writer Vlad Raiber and disappears without a trace.

Parallel dimension

Writer Vlad Raiber publishes the diaries he received and includes Artur Glagolev’s own account. Together with his girlfriend, Marti, he explored the workshops of an abandoned factory. In the administrative building, they discovered a mysterious room with mirrored chairs and a tightly locked door. They took a vibrating blue disk made of an unknown metal, a strange, mocking postcard, and frightening wallpaper with toothy faces. In exchange, Artur lost his leather gloves forever.

Marty found an old film projector at home. In the darkened apartment, the friends watched terrifying footage of translucent creatures with translucent bones. The monsters in the illustrations committed vile acts and spat green mush. During another visit to the factory, Arthur and Marty encountered the inhabitants of the mysterious room. Marty instantly fainted from sheer terror, seeing in the creepy intruders her own exact doubles.

Later, Arthur carefully studied the illustrated children’s encyclopedia they had left behind. It turned out that the Hums were inhabitants of a parallel world, completely devoid of natural aggression. They were forced to blindly imitate the destinies of earthlings due to an inexplicable symbiotic bond. The human world seemed to the Hums to be a contaminated territory of endless, bloody wars and torment. Agents of an unknown government organization ransacked Arthur’s apartment and stole all the alien artifacts. The former factory grounds were swiftly razed to the ground, completely obliterating the point of spatial contact between the two realities. Only a blue metallic disk, accidentally rolled under an old sofa, survived. Arthur gave the thick folder containing the diaries to the writer so that ordinary people would learn the truth before his official elimination.