On a Thursday night Katie goes on a family outing with her parents and they find themselves at a run-of-the-mill carnival with three looming tents. One tent is for the kids, one tent is an animal show, and the final tent is a freak show. They decide to go to the freak show, unsure if the opportunity would arise again due to its questioned legality. What they find inside are not the expected anomalies that would be in the traveling circuses of the 1920s, but instead performers pushing the boundaries of what the human body is capable of surviving.

Each performer's act reflects the different addictions that had destroyed their lives. The Eternal Drunk, an alcoholic, must keep his blood-alcohol content above a certain level for the remainder of his life. The Wheeling Contortionist, a sex addict, lives her life nude inside a glass wheel. The Sword-Eater, a masochist, has a sword as a permanent ball-gag.

To Katie's surprise, the carnival is much more than just a dark glance into the criminal underworld, but also the literal underworld. The show is the lovechild of Bune Lusus, A Duke of Hell. What he offers is the opposite of selling your soul to the devil. By offering to experience a lifetime of hell, the performers are granted a boon to spend an eternity in heaven. Or at least that's what they're led to believe.