The last will of their suicide aunt requires that Scott and Madeline Madden return to Caveat, the vast old Hollywood Hills house they grew up in—and they soon learn that what they had thought was a shared childhood nightmare twenty years ago is in fact all too real.

Their strange, reclusive cousins, Claimayne and Ariel, are deeply involved in using a form of the Medusa—living two-dimensional psychoactive patterns known as “spiders”—to prolong their own lives and even hijack the lives of others…

Scott and Madeline are tumbled into the Medusa's web, and find themselves struggling in a tangle of lives and deaths extending back to the earliest days of Hollywood, fracturing timelines in the past and fleeing from predators in the present, inexorably bound for a showdown with the voracious ghost of their aunt and the entity which is the oldest and most powerful of the spiders.