For the town of Randall, Arizona, the terror starts quietly, oddly—a senile woman in her eighties becomes pregnant. Then the town's beloved minister mysteriously disappears, leaving his church and home hideously defiled by blasphemous obscenities scrawled in blood. Farmers going out to their fields in the morning find their herds of goats slaughtered. Then, as the terror intensifies, the farmers themselves are massacred. The town begins to smell of death, and the trust which has bound neighbors to one another turns to ashes. But the relentless tide of death is only an augury of a far more unspeakable cataclysm. A stranger arrives, an itinerant preacher with mad eyes and an elemental presence named Brother Elias. He seeks out three men: the sheriff, tough, no nonsense Jim Weldon; the new minister, a gentle God-fearing soul named Father Andrews; and Gordon Lewis, a young newlywed whose pregnant wife Marina is the unknowing center of the coming fury. Together, these people must face an implacable force of evil as old as the world and as relentless as the desert sun...