Maggie Caine and her family leave New York to visit the Caine family home, an old farmhouse in Ohio, which her husband has just inherited from a distant aunt. The house, 10 miles away from the nearest neighbor, was once owned by a Civil War general reputed to have been a Satanist. But when strange and terrible things begin to happen, it soon becomes clear that satanic worship is still alive and well in the community, and so might be the general, who Maggie suspects is taking possession of her teenage son.

Richard Fountain, a promising young Cambridge scholar, went to the island of Crete to study ancient rites and pagan rituals before, suddenly and inexplicably, breaking off all contact with the outside world. Disturbing rumors have filtered their way back to England, whispering of blasphemous rituals and obscene orgies, hints of terrible crimes and wanton murder.

Golgotha Falls lies in a desolate and blighted valley in Northern Massachusetts where, in 1919, Father Bernard K. Lovell, priest of the Church of the Eternal Sorrows, fell prey to isolation and despair and entered a dark night of madness, necrophilia, and suicide. Then, in 1978, a Jesuit priest was sent to reconsecrate the church but found himself seized in the foul grip of bestiality. Now, Father Malcolm, a saintly priest, has arrived to do battle with the forces of Satan that have possessed the church.

"They're just kids.... It's only a game." That's what Barbara, a lovely 20-year-old babysitter told herself when she awoke bound and gagged. But the knots were tight and painful and the children would not let her go.

After a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where three Victorian houses loom over the shimmering beach. Two of the houses are habitable, while the third is slowly and mysteriously being buried beneath an enormous dune of blindingly white sand. But though long uninhabited, the third house is not empty.