Richard Pepen comes to the campus of Hampden College in Vermont to escape the featureless, dusty California of his childhood, and to further his studies of ancient Greek. In this tightly woven liberal arts community there are five other students of Papen's chosen subject, all of them intimidatingly remote from the rest of the student body and fiercely loyal to their professor and mentor, the stiffly eccentric Julian Morrow. Each of his students has surrendered control of their college curriculum entirely to him. Papen makes a similar sacrifice and progresses from these external rituals and loyalties to a much deeper, more disturbing involvement in Dionysian rites and murder. The consuming effects of his guilt and atonement occupy the latter sections of the novel.