Mike Guillory finishes his usual morning beach run on his family-owned Plover's Island and notices that the sky and water are an strange shade of green. Unusually hot and humid for early March, this odd weather event climaxes in a bizarre late-night storm. The next day, Mike, his family, and their dogs, Travis and Poo, wake up to the beginning of a new and menacing world. William, the first Guillory to live on the island with his family in 1908, sees his life change with a tragedy linking him to the ancient mermen creatures living deep within the sea and then with a eccentric group of theatrical people and their new enterprise, a carnival of curiosities. His relationship to these two situations intertwines and changes his destiny. Over the next several decades, the events of the past and the present link the little island and the Guillory family to a world-changing occurrence that is first felt the night of the storm but secretly had begun years earlier in the depths of the waters off the island's shore.