Gilliger Graham, a struggling writer, is told by his agent that he must produce a hit novel if he is to save his career.
He decamps to his old family home, where his father, who was once a very successful writer, had died under mysterious circumstances many years before. Disturbed by the reminders of his old family life, Gilliger struggles to find his muse, and driven to drink, he stumbles across an old hidden manuscript - his father's unfinished, last novel.
He soon realizes the novel is better than anything he can write himself and decides to plagiarize the book, and begins transposing it to his laptop. Then, his real troubles begin. Haunted by the characters from the book, he begins to understand that the novel is a part confessional, which implicates his deceased father at the center of a murder…