There’s a curse on the Kuckuck building.

It’s been abandoned for more than a decade. It’s boarded up and slated for demolition. In other words, it’s a magnet for kids to break, enter, climb the stairs and explore. Which is exactly what Riley Hawkins, grade-school bully, decides to do …

… Until the building strikes back!

Before Riley can go upstairs, he’s plunged into an abyss, reliving his most horrifying nightmare. When he staggers free from the grip of despair and death, he knows he has stumbled upon the most fearsome secret in the village of Hercules, Wisconsin.

Riley begins a campaign of terror that can’t help but draw the attention of Police Chief Jim Otis. Ushered by Riley into the “cursed” building, Otis finds himself forced to relive his most frightening moment. Suddenly, it’s his job to pierce the building’s dark secret.

Did the Kuckuck sisters, before they died, cast the spell? Maybe it was a Ho-Chunk crone, embittered by the treatment of her people, who was trapped alone upstairs until she died.

What about the building’s last tenant, a macabre and shadowy character obsessed with the death rituals of ancient Egypt? Where did “Pyramid” Purlew go, and why did he leave behind four jars whose contents are too awful to examine?

To solve the mystery, Jim Otis leans on his friends and deputies, a Ho-Chunk shaman, a deer butcher named Orlo, an Egyptologist from the university and, of course, his feisty and resourceful daughter, Natalie …

… not to mention Tatum, the story’s obligatory dog.

All of which begs the biggest question of all:

Is Jim gonna marry Carol, or not?