Bailey lives with her brother Hunter and her father Bug, who raises them alone in a squat in northern Kent. Bug doesn't have much time to devote to them. Bailey looks for attention and adventure elsewhere.
In 1969, twelve-year-old Alan Parrish rolls the dice on a mysterious board game and vanishes into it. Twenty-six years later, two children find the same game in the same abandoned house and start playing. Alan comes back out — grown, wild, and barely coherent, and so does everything the game has been holding: stampeding animals, a hunter who followed Alan through, monsoon rain, and a jungle swallowing the town whole. The only way out is to finish what was started.