The man behind the lodge.

James Tetrud spent his career as a neurologist specializing in movement disorders, with research centered on Parkinson's disease. He was part of the team that described the MPTP cases in the mid-1980s — a group of patients whose sudden-onset parkinsonism gave the field its first dependable model of the disease and changed the direction of research for a generation.

Some places remember what happened in them. Some creatures do, too.

His fiction covers the same ground from the other side. Up North, his first novel, is a decades-spanning suspense story set deep in Minnesota's north woods, along the real Highway 61 and Gunflint Trail.Dark Messengers trades the blizzard for the laboratory, asking what happens when science gives a voice to creatures who have been watching us all along.

Whether the danger arrives from a snowed-in past or an engineered future, his novels share one conviction: the most frightening mysteries are the ones with a perfectly reasonable explanation — almost.