Chris Chandler is trying to escape the glare of the media while the State of Maine reviews his conviction and investigates the disappearance of so many corpses from Bemishstock. He flees to the tiny town of Lewis, Vermont where he's been invited to house-sit the estate of a mysterious family with a history stretching back to the thirteenth century and the Albigensian Crusade. There he discovers one of the town's prodigal sons has recently returned with a plan for a Goth festival and Grand Guignol Theater, which he'll fund…with human remains. Once again, Chris and Gillian must do battle with grave robbers and hostile officials, this time with the aid of an ancient amulet and the spirit world itself, while they also struggle to free Chris of Mallory Dahlman's vengeful spirit.

Who knew the dead have more to fear from the living than the living have to fear from the dead? Certainly not seventeen-year-old Chris Chandler, not before his family moved to Bemishstock, Maine in the autumn of 1985.His father’s job is to close plants for Allied Paper Products of Wisconsin. Bemishstock is his fourth crumbling town in six years, and each one has resented and harassed the Chandlers more hatefully than the previous. Even Chris will admit that his family’s odyssey across America has turned him into a lonely, brooding nutcase, and he has only survived the soul-sucking experience by remaining virtually invisible. Then suddenly one day, after a couple of totally stupid mistakes, Chris finds himself trapped between two nightmarish forces—a grave robber and a vengeful demon—and like the cemetery guardians of old, he must defeat both or end up a corpse himself and cursed for all eternity.