To escape the tensions of his past, ex-newspaperman Roger Newton retreats to Vermont's fabled Northeast Kingdom, the wildest, most remote portion of the state. But there he discovers a terrifying secret that turns his life upside-down.
Newton's adventure begins when Claude Lavigne, a power company employee, sees something monumentally strange in the forests of "the gore" -- a tiny swatch of unclaimed land created by a surveyor's mistake. The uncanny sight so upsets him, so rattles his sense of what's real, that it leads to his suicide.
Lavigne's son, his best friend, and an ancient black man risk an expedition into the gore to discover what Mr. Lavigne saw. In his attempt to stop them, Newton upsets a centuries- old balance that threatens to loose a long-buried nightmare upon the people of Vermont.