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. 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.