Devastated and homeless after a personal tragedy, Courtney Edmiston accepts an invitation to stay with her old college friend Jan Blackburn. Jan lives with her brother David and their eccentric Aunt Martha on the edge of the Dismal Swamp, near Fearing, North Carolina. There Courtney soon discovers that the Blackburns have tragedies and enemies of their own. Plus there is the strange, monstrous, looming figure she keeps glimpsing in the swap. Is this the ghostly entity known only as the Monarch? Is it friend . . . or deadly foe?