Unlucky in love and estranged from his family, Professor Dudley Potter's only desire is to withdraw into the secure realm of seventeenth-century poetry. But his unexpected, passionate love for a woman named Annabel Lee changes all that: her sudden disappearance and his obsession with finding her again shatters his sheltered world. Dudley's desperate pursuit takes him to unknown and treacherous worlds: Boston's porno district, the uneasy home of a friend with an "open" marriage, the stark Yorkshire coast where Annabel's mother built a strange memorial to a tortured poet, and a bizarre House of Usher in New York City.