When Luke and Anne Magnum move to his late Uncle Bart's great house on the Black Warrior River in western Alabama after the death of their son Paul from AIDS, they had no way of knowing what was in store for them. Luke and Anne, joined by their son's surviving lover, Rob Macon, find themselves involved in a series of ghostly and sensual hauntings that Luke senses might be related to the old tale he had heard about a strange river creature captured in the town of Erie in the 1830s that led to the demise of that town. Before he can solve the mystery, he and his loved ones find themselves embroiled in a sensual phantasmagoria involving the living and the dead. Reading the journals of Bartholomew Magnum, they begin to sense something of what fate may have in store for them. But the truth is even stranger. . . And something deadly is approaching from downriver.