A dead mother. An auctioned childhood home. Loss in the womb of a coal mine. Seldom Seen follows Brander, an Illinois native who moves to Alaska after high school to trap game and escape the hardships of his family. Brander returns to Illinois two years later to find that his mother has died of cancer and the property where he grew up is soon to be auctioned off by his eldest brother. While failing to reconcile this sudden shift, Brander encounters Richter, a specter of a man who promises him that the answers to life are in Seldom Seen Mine, the largest coal mine in the United States. With nothing holding him back, Brander moves to Pennsylvania, takes a job at Seldom Seen Mine, and fails at every attempt to amend his life, losing a friend, a lover, and maybe his mind.