Okiku, the 300 year old vengeful spirit of a murdered Japanese teenage girl, and Tark, a seventeen-year old Japanese-American high school student/spirit magnet, are back in The Suffering, a companion novel to The Girl From The Well. In The Girl From The Well, Okiku helped Tarq fight the evil living within his skin. Now the two are inseparable (literally). They make a bit of an odd team, what with one being a vengeful spirit who often looks like a rotting corpse and all, but the two are actually the best of friends. Okiku helps Tark with his hobby of exorcising spirits and Tark helps Okiku carry out her bloody vengeance…