Chandler is on trial for rape and murder in a world where such acts have become commonplace due to spontaneous, unexplained demonic “possessions.” His trial is deemed necessary, as the location where his acts were carried out was assumed to be immune to such possessions. Chandler’s trial ends with his exile and his being branded on the forehead. His experiences after the trial take him far from his home and put him on the trail of the source of these mysterious possessions.

First serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1962, Frederik Pohl’s Plague of Pythons was later published as a novel in 1965, and then further revised and re-published under the title Demon in the Skull in 1984. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the first Galaxy serialization.