Four years after the sudden death of his wife, forty-year-old bestselling novelist Mike Noonan is unable to write and plagued by vivid nightmares set at the Maine summerhouse he calls Sara Laughs. Mike reluctantly returns to the lakeside getaway and finds his beloved Yankee town held in the grip of a vindictive millionaire, Max Devore, who is trying to take his three-year-old granddaughter away from her widowed young mother, Mattie. As Mike is drawn into Mattie's struggle -- and begins to fall in love with her -- he is also drawn into the mystery of Sara Laughs, now the site of ghostly visitations and escalating terrors. What do the forces that have been unleashed here want of Mike Noonan?