Christ's Second Coming motivates several characters during the Civil War battle of Fredericksburg. They assume the bloodbath of December, 1862, is the biblical Armageddon, and that Confederate General Stonewall Jackson will be revealed as Christ come again. The Apocalypse also figures in 2nd Century Asia Minor, where a certain Montanus believes he is the incarnation of God the Father, and that his two female disciples form a new Trinity, who will orchestrate the world's end. The eras unite first by a magical talisman, which is thought to have healing, resurrecting, and prophetic properties; and second, by a demonic girl who first appears on the battlefield.

In the novel, the word 'Apocalypse' also connotes radical, psychological shifts: A slave rejects his paradoxical thought world by escaping North in a railroad crate, having spent his early years raised by a white mother, the wife of a plantation owner, while 'playing' the slave fully when he is auctioned to a new master as an adolescent. Reality upends as a doubting Protestant cleric-grief stricken at the loss of his young daughter-embraces revenge. A prim, finishing school mistress willingly enters the dark realm of a murderous stranger, rejecting her past for a sudden and seemingly inexplicable romance. A street preacher abandons his apocalyptic obsession for one greater: a young, black woman he spots on an auction block in Richmond and madly pursues-a passion which, in the end, offers purpose and hope.

The novel follows the medieval poet Dante Alighieri's (1265-1321) tripartite division of his "Divine Comedy" Volume 1 represents 'The Inferno'-the battle of Fredericksburg and its immediate aftermath. Volume 2 contains 'Purgatorio' and 'Paradiso'-walking through desolation in the former and attaining heaven in the latter. The novel subverts the poet, however, suggesting that hell and heaven confront us fully in this life. Dante's paramour, Beatrice, who he barely knew, plays out in several love sequences, suggesting that love is most powerful when it is immediate and irrational.