Asylum Earth

From the Publisher's Website:

There are creatures called the Hidden who move among us, perching on our dinner table as we have dinner and crawling across our ceiling as we sleep in our beds. Some are no bigger than maggots, others resemble skinned dogs and roam the streets at night in packs. The most dangerous ones follow us home, that stare at us in the street and wait for a reaction. They sit next to us on buses and grind their teeth next to our ears, spitting obscenities at all within earshot. Most of us never notice them because they're not Real. But they want to be. More than anything else in the world.

They bound me in a strait jacket and jammed a rubber bite-guard in my mouth. I was put in a nine by five padded cell with a six inch wide observation slit. Every six hours, day and night, the doctors came in to administer the drugs; the orderlies holding me down to stop me killing the bastards. I dislocated my jaw screaming the first night. The cell was covered in grubs they could not see. During the night they crawled over my face, scraping into my eyes and nose. I was reduced to rolling around the cell, trying to smash them to death against the soft canvas walls.

By the third day, I had calmed down. The doctors assumed the drugs had taken hold. But the real reason was simple - the grubs were gone. I had worked the bung out of my mouth and I had eaten them. Every last one.

- James Bishop, London, 1987

The world of Heretics is split into three types of people, Believers, Unbelievers and the Heretics. Unbelievers refuse to acknowledge the existence of anything supernatural or bizarre. Believers are sensitive to the unnatural and bizarre. They can sense the presence of the Hidden but can only see flickers of them out of the corner of their eye at best.

To Heretics the Hidden are as real as the rest of the world. They see them every day; the grubs on our ceilings that drop to feed on our dreams as we sleep, the nestlings that live in the sewers and dark places. They see the packs of Kanid roaming the streets at night looking for a lone human to attack and devour. The Heretics see the world for what it really is and the sight has driven them irrevocably Insane.

Heretics live in a world where their psychoses become Real. Unable to control their beliefs, they end up persecuted by their vision of a world that no-one else can see.