Edgar Freemantle, a wealthy Minnesotan building contractor, barely survives a severe worksite accident wherein his truck is crushed by a crane.

On the advice of his psychologist, Dr. Kamen, Edgar relocates southward and rents a beach house on the island of Duma Key, off the Florida coast.

Decades-old paranormal phenomena revisit Duma Key as Edgar delves obsessively into his art, lapsing into a semi-conscious haze; his artwork captures psychic visions, revealing his ex-wife's affair, his friend's suicidal depression and his younger daughter Ilse's fleeting marital engagement.

Later, Edgar uses his newfound artistic powers to manipulate the outside world, healing Jerome's degenerating neurological condition and suffocating a child murderer in his jail cell.

When Ilse visits the island, she and Edgar drive to a disused, overgrown area where colors seem unnaturally vivid, and Ilse becomes violently ill. Elizabeth warns Edgar that Duma Key "has never been a lucky place for daughters" and that his paintings must be sold to multiple geographically distant buyers, lest their otherworldly power grow too concentrated or dangerous.

Edgar's art becomes more vivid and distressing, featuring ship-and-seaside compositions whose vessel and mysterious, red-cloaked passenger draw nearer to shore in each successive painting.

Edgar notices previously unseen details in his work: the ship's rotting sails, children toys littering its decks, screaming faces hiding in its foamy wake.

Fighting their way to Duma Key's overgrown region—Heron's Roost, the original Eastlake manor—the trio locate the Perse-carving, sealed in a salt water-filled ceramic keg of whiskey, in which a crack has formed during the passage of years.

[3] Richard Rayner in the Los Angeles Times called the novel a "beautiful, scary idea" with gritty down-to-earth characters.

"[King] writes as always with energy and drive and a wit and grace for which critics often fail to give him credit [but] the creepy and largely interior terror of the first two-thirds of the story dissipates somewhat when demon sailors come clanking out of the ocean.