Is it possible to ever truly escape one's past? For thirteen-year-old Matthew and his girlfriend Melissa, who are finally free from the dominance of a repressive religious cult, the Philadelphia Brethren, the answer seems to be no. Even though they are now members of loving adoptive families, the teens still have to deal with some troublesome lingering issues from their past lives.

Melissa harbours a deep resentment towards her fanatically religious former parents for depriving her of a happy and carefree childhood. They had subjected her to years of mental and physical abuse, social isolation, and denial of personal freedoms. Matthew struggles with anxious thoughts about the safety of his loved ones and is having frightful nightmares about his demented ex-stepmother Vivian. To make matters worse, their otherwise idyllic 1960s Saskatchewan community is put on edge following attempts on both Melissa's life and another innocent young person.

Matthew's graphic nightmares begin to overwhelm him as they resurrect painful memories of his troubled past, a past that he is desperately trying to forget. Matthew also believes that a few of those nightmares could actually be real-life excursions into horrific alternate realities where the familiar concepts of time and space become disjointed and incomprehensible.

Menace From the Past is the fifth book in the Threefold Cord series that follows the story of the adopted sons in the Adamson family who are all religious cult "refugees" and it is the first in the series to be narrated by Matthew. A bonus supplement is also featured, Camp Purgatory, where Matthew recounts the last few weeks of his former life in the Philadelphia Brethren church when he and his best friend Danny were subjected to intensive religious indoctrination at a summer youth camp.