Successful sculptor Barry Ryan is in search of a blood relative for his bone marrow transplant; being adopted, he must travel to the town of Auraria where a genealogist has traced his ancestry. His adoptive sister Jen and her boyfriend Jackson join Barry on the trip, but what they find is a town abandoned. Except for the dead-who never really left. By day, the creatures that inhabit this town are but ghostly remnants of their former selves. At night, however, they transform into a physical-and lethal-form. There's no escaping Auraria with all roads leading back to where they started, and Barry, Jen, and Jackson know that joining a band of survivors is their only hope. Struggling against his own dark urges, Barry flees to an old, abandoned plantation. It is at this plantation, Barry's familial home, that he discovers his own tragic heritage. That his family is under the control of an evil entity called Evangeline due to a series of events initiated over a hundred years earlier by Ezra Rhodes, Barry's distant relative. Mixing science fiction with horror, and the real with the supernatural, William McNally brings to life a world where the past maintains a firm grip on the present, and man's own fatal desires are brought disturbingly to light. Readers of Stephen King and Dean Koontz will delight in this chillingly oppressive tale.