Young married couple Saul and Patsy settle down in a small Michigan town where Saul embarks on a career as a teacher of remedial students, but their lives are thrown off course when one of those students inexplicably kills himself in their yard.
When Saul is assigned to teach a remedial writing course, a troubled student develops an odd fixation on him and and his wife, Patsy, leading Saul to question everything about his life.
The life of Nathaniel Mason, a graduate student in upstate New York, seems to not really be his own after he meets the cryptic, mysterious Jerome Coolberg and begins a dark spiral toward a nervous breakdown.
