 The book contains three epigraphs from Bram Stoker's novel " Dracula".The novel begins in the week before Halloween in the fictional western Maryland town of Stillwater in the days after a terrible flood has washed up the body of a hairless boy along the shores of the local culvert known as the Narrows.When two young boys, Matthew Crawly and Dwight Dandridge, go down to the Narrows to inspect the body of a dead deer, Matthew sees a figure he believes to be his estranged father up on the hill outside the town's abandoned plastics factory.