Young Trevor was placed in an unhappy state home, where he discovered his own talent for drawing but remained alone, obsessed with the question of why he was allowed to live.

Now as an adult, he travels back to Missing Mile, North Carolina, to search for answers in the abandoned house where the murders took place.

In New Orleans, Zachary Bosch is a nineteen-year-old computer hacker on the run from the law after his online misdeeds attract the notice of the FBI.

The characters Trevor and Zachary reappear in Brite's short story "Vine of the Soul", published in 1998 in Disco 2000, edited by Sarah Champion.

When a man set himself on fire in the Los Angeles, California location of a commercial mailbox company, copies of this novel were saturated with the smell of burnt flesh.