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In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed, the Echota family has been suspended in grief. The mother, Maria, struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer's in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude. Their son, Edgar, fled home long ago. With the family's annual bonfire approaching - an occasion marking both the Cherokee National Holiday and Ray-Ray's death - each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. In the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, where old atrocities echo.