A new husband and a new home - what more could a bride want? Unfortunately home is an isolated ramshackle farmhouse near an encroaching forest. And each day her husband grows quieter and more introspective. Worse, Rachel cannot ignore the awesome forest nearby. The woods have become a hiding place for abandoned children. But are they really abandoned? And most terrible of all - are they really children?

Fiften years is a long time. Memories fade away, but the horror remains.Fifteen years ago, two newlyweds perished at the edge of the woods. Now a development of one-family homes stands where their farm once was. For Janice McIntyre and her husband, this new community by the quiet, lovely woods is a perfect place to raise their expected child. Except for the ghosts...

Homecoming. Now once again, after so many centuries, they stood upon the island. Manhattan Island. The place which, before the buildings had been put up to cut the sky apart and before the subways sliced through the earth, had been the place of their birth. The place where they had first sprung up. People were going to learn ...

It's a nice house on a country road. Jack and Erika Harris expect to be happy there. — It doesn't matter that they're living near a deserted suburb where, years ago, murders and mutilations destroyed the residents. It doesn't matter—until those that caused the deaths come back—those that sprang from the earth, those that need, those that are not human. The Harris' nice house stands between them and what they must have. Nothing has ever mattered more.

Jack Erthmun does not believe that the dead actually speak to him, but in their own way they tell him so much. Jack is a New York City police detective with his own very peculiar ways of solving homicides, and those ways are beginning to frighten his colleagues. He gets results, but at what cost? What's happening to Jack Erthmun? This may be Jack's last case. He's assigned to a series of unspeakable killings, gruesome murders with details that make even seasoned detectives queasy. But as he goes deeper into the facts of the case, facts that make it seem no human killer can be involved, Jack begins to get more and more erratic. Is it the case that's affecting Jack? Or is it something else, something no one even dares to consider?