Whitney Paxton visits home after considering problems in the family. He is returning to his family home for the holidays. His brother Quinn has recently been derailed in life by an unhealthy problem with alcohol, and before the visit, Whitney has a strange, spiritual premonition that he is going to see something unfathomable and perhaps evil. Over the course of his visit, he sees through his family's façade and realizes they are conspiring to commit a murder.
"The Doll"
Florence is a dazzling young lady who loved dolls and dollhouses as a child. Now, she lives as a successful administrator at a Liberal Arts college. She doesn't have anyone in her life, romantically speaking, and her life has been one of success. She is skillful with her personality performance, but something is wrong; she is turning into a doll and losing her animation.
"The White Cat"
Miranda marries a man named Julius who is much older than she. Julius sees that she is lonely and emotionally strained, so he buys her a cat. Much to his chagrin, she obsesses herself with the cat and begins to identify more closely with her cat than with any human. Julius watches his wife's relationship with the cat and begins to draw conclusions about how she must feel toward him.
"Bingo Man"
We meet Rose Mallow. She has always felt some discomfort around the issues of romance and sexuality, but now at 39 years old, she realizes that unless she decides to make something happen, she will live her whole life and die alone, without ever having united herself to another person in love. She decides to find someone to sleep with, struggling along the way to understand romance and love, because she only conceived of those things in a passive way.
"Poor Bibi"
A family consults with a doctor about an unhealthy member of the family. They request that he help them to euthanize Bibi, which disgusts and disturbs him. He makes them leave. The reader learns that Bibi is actually the family dog, not a person. They still decide to kill Bibi and try to attack the dog to murder it in cold blood.
