Rich, stingy and miserly Elma Dinnock is livid at losing the Yarborough Country pumpkin-growing contest 22 years in a row, and so gets help from a mysterious botanist for the next competition. Will she finally triumph?

Ignored by his self-absorbed, social-climbing parents, 5-year-old Jonah Kelley wanders his lonely, sterile house and then the outside world, searching for someone who will see him, while things and people disappear in his wake.

Applying experiments with chimps to himself, a dying scientist transfers his mind into a computer. But his unique survival after physical death brings unexpected heartaches.