The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shades editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the Great Beaver, Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad – and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be.