In Colonial America Herkimer Barnard attacks the "one-eyed" Stranger on the road to rob him - and becomes the latest in a string of unwilling hosts of the monster the Mondoki when something bursts out of the stranger's gut at him. Barnard won't remember the gpry details. He is eventually left tied up in a stone-walled room that is then buried to confine the evil within him forever. Two hundred years later that tomb is opened, Barnard revives, and the passing along of the hellish possession to a new series of unwilling hosts continues with each of those soon eager to die to be freed even while they hate what they must impose on someone else in order to accomplish that. A local lawman, a scholar who has searched the records of several centuries for references to this entity, and a small local newspaper owner must try to end the chain of horror by ending the creature that cannot live outside a human host and cannot allow that host any comfort but has not had time to learn enough about modern processes and dangerous materials.