The Book of Accidents

In March 1990, serial killer Edmund Walker Reese sits in the electric chair at Blackledge State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania. Reese murdered four young girls at Ramble Rocks, a rural park and boulder field in Bucks County, and was captured only when a fifth victim escaped. Carl Graves, a prison guard, attends the execution and exchanges barbed words with Reese about his crimes. When the executioner flips the switch, Reese does not die; he vanishes in a flash of light. In a second prologue set months later, a hunter discovers a blood-covered boy near the abandoned Ramble Rocks coal mine. The boy, who went missing earlier that year, kills the hunter with a coal pick-ax.

Twenty-five years later, the Graves family lives in Philadelphia. Oliver Graves, 15, has a severe panic attack during a school lockdown drill. He possesses an unusual empathic ability: He can see other people's pain as dark, pulsing shapes inside them. His father, Nate Graves, a police officer, worries Oliver lacks the resilience to survive the world. A lawyer offers Nate his dying father Carl's Bucks County home for one dollar, but Nate refuses at first; Carl had an alcohol addiction and was violent throughout Nate's childhood. Nate's wife, Maddie Graves, a sculptor, argues the move would benefit Oliver. Oliver overhears the debate and volunteers to go. At a private viewing of Carl's corpse, the body suddenly gasps, and Nate sees a second version of his father standing in the corner holding a gun in his left hand, though Carl was always right-handed.

The family settles into the old stone farmhouse. Nate begins work as a Fish and Game officer alongside his partner, Axel Figueroa, known as Fig. Maddie claims a pole barn as her workshop, but while sculpting an owl from a fallen log, she enters a fugue state; when she wakes, the owl is gone. Oliver discovers ants marching in a suicidal circle in his attic bedroom, and Nate and Fig find a diseased deer staggering in the same circular pattern. These recurring phenomena suggest something deeply wrong near Ramble Rocks.

Oliver enrolls at Upper Bucks High and befriends students who play Dungeons & Dragons at lunch, including Caleb Wright and Hina Hirota. Graham Lyons, a popular athlete, and his friend Alex Amati harass the group. Nate begins seeing apparitions: a tall, bearded figure at the woods' edge and visions of his dead father. He chases the figure to the property of Jed Homackie, a neighbor who authored a book about the Reese murders. Jed reveals that Carl once admitted Reese truly vanished from the chair.

A local young man named Jake rescues Oliver when Graham and Alex ambush him, shooting the bullies with a pellet gun. Jake is older, scarred, and possesses one eye that shifts colors. Oliver notices Jake is devoid of the dark pain visible in everyone else. Meanwhile, Maddie forces herself back to work and unconsciously sculpts Reese's head and torso. The sculpture animates, accuses her of stealing Reese's "Number Five," his name for the fifth girl who escaped him, and tries to strangle her before she destroys it.

At a Halloween party, Jed tells the guests about Ramble Rocks: how the Lenape, the Indigenous people of the region, considered the area haunted, and how Reese viewed the boulder field as sacred. A violent storm strikes. Jake leads Oliver into the woods and opens a portal using the Book of Accidents, a logbook of coal mine tragedies that doubles as a spellbook. Oliver sees visions of violence from across realities, including a version of himself being abused by someone who sounds like Nate. Separately, Nate and Fig find a bleeding girl with the number 37 carved into her cheek. Reese appears in a bolt of lightning and slashes Nate before vanishing with the girl.

Nate and Maddie share all their secrets. Maddie reveals that as a child, she unconsciously created a cardboard figure, the Box Man, which stabbed Reese and freed his fifth victim, Sissy Kalbacher. They agree not to tell Oliver.

Jake tells Oliver he comes from another world and that the Book of Accidents lets him access an interstitial space called the In-Between. He argues the world is fundamentally broken; Oliver resists his nihilism. Meanwhile, Nate and Jed venture into Ramble Rocks at night. Inside the old train tunnel, Jed pulls a gun and confesses: His wife and daughter died in a drunk-driving accident he caused, and Jake promised to help undo their deaths. Jake emerges, strikes Nate with a baseball bat, and reveals himself as an alternate-universe version of Oliver. He explains that Nate's love makes this world's Oliver too strong to manipulate, then pushes Nate into another reality.

A flashback reveals Jake's origin. The boy who fell into coal silt survived in the mine tunnels, where he encountered a figure calling himself Eli Vassago. Eli alternated between helping and tormenting the boy before revealing his true form as the demon Eligos Vassago. The demon taught the boy to destroy worlds using the Book of Accidents. The boy ceased to be Oliver and became Jake.

Nate wakes in a post-apocalyptic landscape where multiple collapsed realities have merged. He is attacked by Reese's cult of "zeroes," masked followers who worship the killer, but is rescued by an alternate-universe Carl Graves. This Carl, left-handed and not abusive, explains that Jake has sacrificed a version of Oliver on an altar stone in 98 worlds, collapsing each one. Nate's world is the last.

Maddie tracks Jed, stops his suicide attempt, and forces a confession about Jake's plans. Oliver uses his empathic ability to extract a parasitic mass of pain from Graham, who seems liberated. Graham and his father are soon found dead in an apparent murder-suicide; Oliver blames himself, but Jake committed the killings to push Oliver toward despair. Maddie and Oliver flee to Fig's remote cabin.

Jake contacts Oliver through the cabin television, showing him a bound Caleb and demanding he come to the altar stone by midnight. Jed drives Oliver to Ramble Rocks; along the way, Oliver extracts Jed's grief and discards his gun, choosing to proceed without violence.

In the fallen world, Nate allows lightning to strike him and begins jumping between realities, appearing briefly as the bearded figure on his own lawn months earlier. He materializes outside the cabin and writes in the snow: "TWO HINGES / ONE KNOB / MAKES A DOOR." Maddie sees him, and the encounter unlocks her suppressed childhood memories of saving Sissy by building a door from cardboard and household objects. The 13 wooden owls she carved on the cabin porch blink to life.

At the boulder field, Oliver confronts Jake at the altar stone. Jake ties him down and raises the coal pick. Oliver realizes that Jake's shifting eye is a seal placed by the demon, keeping the demon locked inside him. Using his empathic ability, Oliver claws out the demonic eye, breaking the seal. The demon erupts from Jake as a massive creature of shadow. Fig, stabbed by Deputy Chief Contrino, a state police official corrupted by Jake, manages to incapacitate Contrino. The demon seizes Oliver, but Maddie arrives through a door she built from sticks and stones. She sends her 13 animated owls to tear the demon apart and drives the coal pick into its skull.

In the aftermath, Jake is imprisoned, emptied of the demon. Fig survives his wounds. Nate remains lost between realities; Maddie builds doors every day, hoping one will reach him, but none work. Oliver tells her he wants to use his empathic gift to help people, and she agrees to take him on a road trip. In an epilogue, Reese works as a janitor in another reality, secretly planning new murders. Nate, who has arrived in this same world, tracks Reese and shoots him. As Reese dies, he notices his front door has changed: It now has hand-hammered hinges and a wooden owl-face knob. Nate steps through into darkness, suggesting Maddie's doors have finally reached him.