Cain K. Abel never knew anyone or anywhere that he couldn’t readily walk away from, and his general discontentment with his fellow man and wanderlust carry him from his boyhood home in Connecticut to Los Angeles to the small town of Sweethill, Montana, where he meets hometown party girl Claudia Gene Aldarki and falls in love. He wants to take her with him as his traveling companion, but despite her loose style of life, she’s a good girl at heart and intensely close to her homespun family and unwilling to leave them behind.

He caters to her wishes against his own and his imagination begins to wander and he begins to write and becomes published. He buys a house in which for them to live, and it is the first piece of property that he has ever been able to afford or has really at all wanted to. While tearing up the old rug and the far older linoleum in the living room he discovers within the pages of the fifty year old newspapers which had been laid to protect the floor from its covering the story of a local man named Cain Kay Abel who had killed his wife with a hatchet in their bedroom one night for no apparent reason, and he and Claudia know that they have to locate the murder site if still it stands.

They explore the weary weather-beaten remains of the crime scene and make love upon its bloodstained floor and each is entranced to a different degree by its dark charms and changed afterwards on account of them. His writing grows ever darker and grows legs and she finds her long running vampire fantasy that she has been afraid to share with him to be screaming at her relentlessly and she reclaims her adolescent habit of bloodletting. In her youth she had cut herself out of self-loathing, whereas this time she does so out of uncontrollable sexual desire. She works her way up to introducing this element into their lovemaking by steadily expanding the kinkiness it hosts, and her first attack upon him with one of the razorblades that she has taken to using religiously in out of the way places upon herself and her ravaged teeth leaves him with a savage hickey and leaves her with an unquenchable thirst for his blood.

His increasing success and her increasing obsession with him and bloodletting lead them to ever maddening turbulence, betrayal, hardcore drug addiction, and a conclusion marked by a twisted revelation not to be missed.