Living in the thin strip that is Malibu, with celebrities on one side of the highway, and the wilderness of The Foothill Mountains on the other side, a young woman suffers cognitive dissonance. She hallucinates in order to pursue a more comfortable, less confusing life-as a rapacious swamp monster devoid of conscience. But as civilization encroaches on her domain, and she sees something appealing about being human, confusion and conscience return to spoil her unbridled appetite. Previously an eternal creature, she has to adapt humanly, and that makes her vulnerable to mortality. In the end, the only way to defeat death is to discover escape through the simple fantasy that some vulnerable young girls have of finding a man, rich and handsome, to chase away all her fears. For all her effort to be stronger, the monster finds herself right back in the morass of human frailty.