Our narrator is haunted. Haunted by panic attacks, a failed relationship, alcoholism, an academic career that wants to define him by his Blackness, and the trauma of the recent death of his 17-year-old son, Malcolm. When a letter arrives informing him that his maternal grandfather has left Malcolm a plot of land, our narrator leaves his life behind and heads to the seaside of the Northeast, where his identity is shaken by the dark and haunting secret that lies beneath this inherited land.