The year is 1975. A successful writer suffering a seemingly unbreakable writer's block abandons his life in California to take up residence in the cold seclusion of New England. Seeking escape from all things familiar in the hopes of curing the tormenting inability to write, Matthew Cross soon finds there are far worse torments awaiting.

Introduced to annoyingly attractive real estate agent, Francis Petrier, he is led to what could only be a condemned building in retaliation for what she believes is his arrogant, dismissive, inconsiderate behavior. Instead of the payback she intended, Matt is impossibly drawn to the run-down building, His interest defying common sense or logic. He decides to rent the questionable house, offering up a silent prayer to any listening deity that this would be the key to unlocking his imagination.

He had no inkling of who or how that prayer would be answered.

Matt is given a strange key forged in the shape of a typewriter, oddly cold, which leads to a hidden attic within the house where he discovers an ancient typewriter.

Lulled into a deceptive pact he doesn't understand, Matt seeks the assistance of the real estate agent who becomes involved in the nightmare in his desperate need for information concerning the former owner of the house, who he learns was also a writer, specializing in the occult, who also endured the same demonic pact before committing suicide, leaving behind only more vague clues in a surviving sister and diary.

The trio, which now includes an eleven-year-old boy, must solve the mystery and uncover the method to break the pact or destroy the typewriter before the sinister machine can kill everyone they love before ultimately targeting the author himself.