When fourteen year-old Jackson's life is uprooted, he finds his new hometown, idyllic Atavus Falls, under attack by something not easily explained. The locals choose to call it a rabid bear or a mountain lion but as the monster closes in on Jackson and his family, the traumatized community comes to find that their killer is actually the product of a mangled sociological experiment whereupon an unhinged psychologist raised a feral child, a child completely deprived of all human contact, in order to prove that language is a contagion, a human virus infecting us all.The fates of Jackson and the killer prove to be entwined at the rootmost level, and at its unnerving conclusion, the tale of Atavus Falls shows us that sometimes a monster lives in the soul of a child... and sometimes humanity can be seen reflected in the eyes of a monster.