In the impoverished town of Whitbrow, Georgia. Failed academic/military vet Frank Nichols & his partner, Eudora (Dora), move to Whitbrow to claim a family inheritance & write a history of the Savoyard Plantation belonging to his brutal ancestor Julien Savoyard, whose slaves rose up & killed him at the end of the Civil War. An unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with, a presence that comes from the shadowy woods across the river, where the ruins of Savoyard stand & where a debt of blood has never been forgotten.