(NOTE: This 2016 edition has new cover, re-written first paragraph, and new format for Anne's poem on page 85. Except for minor changes, the text is otherwise the same as the earlier version.) Luke and Anne Magnum move to his late Uncle Bart's great house on the Black Warrior River in western Alabama after the death of their son Paul from AIDS. Later they are joined by their son's surviving lover, Rob Macon, and the three experience a series of ghostly hauntings that Luke senses are related to the old tale about a strange river creature captured in the town of Erie in the 1830s that led to the demise of that town. Before he can solve the mystery, he and his loved ones find themselves embroiled in a sensual phantasmagoria involving the living and the dead. In the journals of Bartholomew Magnum, they find clues to what fate may have in store for them. But the truth is even stranger. . .And something deadly is approaching from downriver.