After an appalling education at Euterpe School (The House of Lunacy), Charles Baines moves to California, a successful director of television adverts. In 1974, at the height of its meteoric rise, The Temple of Sufferers and Joseph Priest arrive in San Francisco on their mission of converting souls. Baines is engaged to promote the Temple with a docu-publicity film of life and religion in the Temple's agricultural project in the Amazon jungle. On arrival in "Safehaven", Braziliana, Baines finds himself thrown into a nightmare in a sect from which he can see no escape.