Reporter John Klein is plunged into a world of impossible terror when fate draws him to the sleepy West Virginia town of Point Pleasant, whose residents are being visited by a great winged shape that sows hideous nightmares and fevered visions.

Violinist Sydney Wells was accidentally blinded by her sister Helen when she was five years old. She submits to a cornea transplantation, and while recovering from the operation, she realizes that she is seeing dead people.

A depressed housewife who learns her husband was killed in a car accident the day previously awakens the next morning to find him alive and well at home, and then awakens the day after to a world in which he is still dead.