Hendrick Nellis is a Tory guerrilla at the Niagara frontier at the end of the American Revolution; he is also a redeemer of whites abducted by Indians. He kidnaps his own son, Oskar, for King George's army, and it is Oskar, haunted by dreams, who tells this ambivalent tale of war and redemption.

The violent, erotic, and partly true story of The Life and Times of Captain N. trespasses into the psychic no-man's-land where the delirium of combat drives human nature into a primal frenzy.