Black Road unfolds in a small Ohio town, with one high school and one celebrated football team and one jumbo marching band. When the bad-boy star quarterback and his friends go too far one night with one of their pranks, a car crash severely injures two other students. The consequences of the crash and the court trials that follow reverberate through the town, reaching beyond the local community in haunting, almost surreal ways as the larger world seems to be turned upside down.

As the details leading up to the crash are revealed bit by bit, a surprising number of people are implicated the outsider teenager who lives alone in a trailer next to the Amish farm where the crash happened; a high school teacher who fights to bring goodness and beauty to young lives; an Indian doctor and her school-aged daughter who hopes to follow her brother to Harvard; a Japanese exchange student.

Watching from behind everything is an actual Greek chorus broken loose in time, Apollo and Artemis, lost souls trekking through the modern world.