The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade`s editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the `Great Beaver`, Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? A novel constructed around the last great poem of a fictional American poet, John Shade, and an account of his death.