A struggling artist hopes to revive his social relevance by making a project out of his new neighbors, but he is forced to confront his own ruination as his obsession grows and old rivals enter the scene.

Through a confronting use of second-person, four haunted houses are hypothesized, each worse than the last, and ending with the most terrifying picture of all: dark reality in suburbia.

A young mother in the rural Northeast writes magical children's books based on her daughter's adventures. Years later, the mother dies, and her daughter returns to her childhood house to find out whether or not the magical world she played in as a child really exists.

A teenage girl befriends a solitary bookworm who summers in her lakeside town, hoping he can help her learn about a lake monster she believes she saw. Over the course of a few summers, the two fall in love. The girl eventually learns the boy is the lake monster, granted human form for three months of the year.

When an aging widower takes a vacation back to the town where he spent his childhood, he realizes that the boarding house where he stays is hiding something monstrous.

A wealthy family moves into a mansion on an island and raises several generations there. As the years pass, different family members show how things have both changed and also stayed the same within the house.

In a Priory community by a yellow lake, a young man works for his mother's acquaintance to build the basement of her beach house. He is pushed to complete the project before the community summer solstice celebration, though the celebration turns out to be a rather cheerless, mundane success without necessitating the finished basement anyway.

A mother invites a former employee to join her on a boat ride where everything takes a turn for the worse.

An inexperienced governess cares for an orphan in a gothic German castle and discovers that the child is a murderous sea serpent.

Two elderly New Yorkers have always enjoyed the summers in their peaceful lakeside cottage in the country. However, when they break tradition by staying past Labor Day, mysterious incidents and unfriendly locals remind them they've overstayed their welcome.