Tanner is the owner of the Star Motel in early twentieth-century Arizona. A queer, masculine black woman, Tanner oversees the hotel with her partner, Jessie, and the motel cook, Flora (Flo). The three women offer cheap rooms to black folks heading north, as they run away from the racial injustices of the American South. At an evening of drinking and dancing with guests at the motel, the three women are accosted by a mysterious man named Glenn, who claims to be the son of Maud. Maud is Tanner’s ex-lover, a woman she ran away from many years ago, and who has since passed away. Even from the grave, Maud has sent her sons, one-by-one, to the Star Motel to bring Tanner back. And while Tanner and the women of the Star Motel have defended themselves against the other eight, killing them and burying them around the motel property, Glenn is the ninth and final son to seek revenge on Maud’s behalf.  Tanner, Jessie and Flo fight off Glenn and his cronies— who the three women quickly learn aren’t human at all, but rather are demons who dissolve when attacked with salt— and kill Glenn after he threatens to bring Tanner and Jessie back to Maud with him. The women enlist the help of Flo’s son, Newt, to drain the blood from Glenn’s body and prepare it for burial. As Jessie complains of getting stuck with Tanner and Flo on the Star Motel property, Tanner recalls her journey away from Maud and the South: her arduous walking on foot, hopping on and off of train cars, and dressing as a man throughout her travels northwest. We learn that Maud’s juju kept Tanner young and unaging when they were together, and that Tanner ran away in part because she wanted to die a natural death. But Maud cursed Tanner with bad juju when she left; Tanner, and by extension, Flo and Jessie too, can no longer leave the Star Motel property without dying at its edge. The women decide to test Maud’s curse. As the youngest, Newt is nominated to walk off of the property to the general store several miles down the road— the other women have tried in the past and got too close to the brink of death before leaving the property. Tanner watches as Newt makes it to three-quarters of a mile before collapsing in the grass. She drags Newt back to the motel, where the three women take care of him and wait for his heartbeat to return and his nose to stop bleeding. Eventually Newt’s heartbeat returns, but his nose continues to bleed. The women discover, to their horror, that Glenn’s spirit has possessed Newt’s body. As the women stand stupefied in Newt’s bedroom, Glenn walks Newt’s body out of the motel, telling the women that one dead son will pay the debt for Maud’s nine sons and Tanner’s abandonment. After he leaves, Flo and Jessie stay stunned in Newt’s room, while Tanner goes downstairs to clean the motel and to switch on the vacancy sign in the window.