In 1975, the unconsciously bigoted Archibald Kelly is busy celebrating his mayoral inauguration at Happyland Community Centre in Barretton when a young girl is seen being murdered behind the building. The witness, Iain McCune drunkenly panics and hops into his car, mowing down a nearby pedestrian. Hamish Milligan, Archibald's "friend" and a detective, is forced to return to town and make a decision about his family while Helen, Archibald's barely-of-age and Black girlfriend who sees the good man he could be, fights to stay important to him. As a result of the previous day's events, Father Sainsbury states to his waning congregation that he feels the town is at a moral crossroads, much to the dismay of his adopted son, Gabriel Jacobs. This affects the lives of the desperate Nancy Maine and her patient, Ophelia Wolanski, as well as businessmen Thomas Dermot and Eddie Palmer who are forced to close the doors to their "home for wayward children" and who are in a discrete relationship together. Each must fight off an impending darkness in their lives, characterized in the form of cockroaches, mice who have run through black paint, tire treads spreading across the pavement, imagined hollow mountains, the red-eyes of bleating goats, tea stains, murdered beavers, traditional elks, and cigarette-tar-filled lungs, as they seek to escape from it all or work to right the wrongs of others. Racism, sexuality, sexism, mental health, and "whatever happened to the world that we knew?": what more could there be?