Thriller writer Tayler Kent, caught in a blizzard en route to his Romney Marsh cottage, stops to deliver a package to Charles Hogarth, a mysterious collector of supernatural stories and strange ephemera that has earned him the moniker "the Master of the Macabre".

Nursing an injury from a car crash, Kent stays with Hogarth in his decrepit home, a haunted former monastery.

He witnesses supernatural occurrences as Hogarth relates a series of stories illustrating his unique collection of macabre items.

[9] In his introduction to the 2013 reissue by Valancourt Books, Mark Valentine compares the structure of the novel to New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors.

He describes the style favorably in the tradition of Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson, who created earlier supernatural detectives.