Joseph Harris, a legendary but troubled playwright, comes to a small Michigan town at Christmastime to mount his latest play. Greeting the cynical New Yorker is a young, aspiring writer who challenges his literary hero to be the icon he’d hoped for. Harris wants no part of Michigan or its small-town theater, and he has no interest in being the young man’s hero. As soon as he arrives, Harris makes plans to return to New York on the next train out. Desperate and scrambling to keep him in town, the young man must face his hero and explore the tangled relationship between the dreams of youth and the wisdom of age.

When beautiful Nicole Saint Aubin disappears, her small-time gangster boyfriend is determined to find her no matter what. His dogged search soon leads him into a strange supernatural world and face-to-face with a long-concealed mystery.

The story revolves around a man trying to uncover the mysterious death of his girlfriend and save an innocent man from the death chamber in the process, by using his unique power to time travel. However in attempting to do this, he also frees a spiteful serial-killer.