Taking place over the course of three abysmally cold winter days in the late 1980s, Harlow tells the story of eighteen-year-old Leslie Somers, a boy who trudges his way through the dark Louisiana backwoods in search of his father, a man whom he has never met. As Leslie walks through the woods, making camp where he can, he thinks of the other men in his life: the ones who took him hunting and fishing, the ones who mistreated him. He can only hope that his father will be different from them, better somehow. But when Leslie finally finds Harlow, the man is not what the boy had expected. Ultimately, the two will end up on a crash course toward destruction, crime, and twisted relationships that will leave one of them dead and the other a hardly recognizable version of his former self.