A young man and an old man, both named Ed, live in the seaside Whirlpool Manor in Victorian England. The younger man, eighteen-year-old Edgar McArbre, possesses an uncanny ability to dream up stories that borders on psychic vision. After he is orphaned, the older man, Lord Edmund Vile, vows to take care of him on one condition- Edgar must express his visions by writing a new story every day, due by the stroke of midnight.

Through the tasks he sets for his protégé, Lord Edmund hopes to piece together the mystery of the shipwreck that killed Edgar's parents. Additionally, the Viscount becomes romantically obsessed with his young charge, while Whirlpool Manor itself is riddled with strange, almost cultic paraphernalia. The Vile family, of which Edmund is the last surviving member, has a monstrous secret of its own...