The seemingly sleepy oil town of Bakersfield has a long and grim history of hostility towards outsiders, be it the "Okies" during the Depression, African-Americans, or labor organizes. When Jack Liffey and his daughter Maeve end up in Bakersfield as a respite from their life in Los Angeles, they find that the town has cast its paranoid fears on a group of rebellious teenaged girls alleged to be Satanists. As hysteria mounts, there is a mammoth book burning and a police raid on all people they deem unsympathetic to their evangelical cause. In the chaos, Maeve disappears and Jack is racing against the clock to find her and save the girls from the town's "exorcism."