Jack Sawyer is a retired Los Angeles homicide detective living in the small hamlet of Tamarak, Wisconsin. He has no recollection of the events twenty years ago that led him to a parallel universe called the Territories to save his mother from certain death. When a series of gruesome murders occurs in western Wisconsin, Jack` s buddy, the local chief of police, begs Jack to help the inexperienced force find the killer. As cryptic messages in Jack` s waking dreams become increasingly difficult to ignore, he is drawn back to the Territories and to his own hidden past, where he must find the soul-strength to enter a terrifying house at the end of a deserted tract of forest-and to encounter the obscene and ferocious evils sheltered within it.