Horror awaits Marlow, a seaman assigned by an ivory company to retrieve a cargo boat and one of its employees, Mr. Kurtz who is stranded deep in the heart of the African Belgian Congo. Marlow's journey up the treacherous dark river soon becomes a struggle to maintain his own sanity as he witnesses the brutalization of the natives by white traders and discovers the enigmatic Mr. Kurtz. Kurtz, once a genius and the company's most successful representative, has transformed into an atrocious savage. His compound is decorated by a row of human heads mounted on spears. The demonic mastermind, liberated from the conventions of European culture, has traded his soul to become ruler of his own horrific sovereignty.

Acclaimed to be one of the great, albeit disturbing, visionary works of western civilization, Conrad's haunting tale dramatizes the ugly realities of British Colonial Imperialism. Heart of Darkness reflects the physical and psychological tragedies that Conrad had experienced while working in the Belgian Congo in 1890 and is the basis of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now film.