Paul Rice promises his new girlfriend, Linda Eastman, that he will take a week off from work and travel with her to meet her parents and younger brother and sister, and stay in her family’s recently renovated home in Lanark, Wisconsin.

There, he encounters a town that is haunted by a history of strange killings and disappearances, a Catholic priest frightened to come out of his church at night, a high school teacher addicted to young boys, and a number of locals who like to talk about the past—especially, Durie house—the house that the Eastmans have just remodeled.

When Paul meets the Eastmans, he finds a father that doesn’t approve of him and a teenager who is afraid of his bedroom and sleeps with the light on.

By week’s end, Paul is immersed in a web of evil that is as old as time, very much alive and thriving in his house that has been a dark shrine to it for three generations, and only waits to be released.

A suspicious police chief watches Paul closely, as he is steadily pulled into a tangle of murders and disappearances that not only test his courage but his sanity as well.