The childhood recovered in this novel is the place from which Harry Crews left at seventeen, intending never to return. Not the miserable tenant cabin where, as a mere baby, he awoke one day beside his dead father, nor even that bed in which he spent much of his childhood dreaming of escaping to the idyllic, scar-free world promised in the glossy pages of Sears catalogs, but the entire Bacon County, with its people and its stories. Above all, its stories.

Stories of hidden moonshine stills deep in the woods, of old bloody grudges, of snakes that speak, of birds that can possess a child’s soul, of delirious preachers and witches who scare away spirits… In Bacon County, everyone tells stories. Stories are everything, and everything is stories. Telling stories is their way of surviving and understanding themselves. Nothing dies if there are stories. Everything—both good and bad—is absorbed and passed down from one generation to the next, and those who carry this legacy are the ones who give it shape and color.

Throughout these pages, the author of The Gospel Singer attempts to return to the territory defined by the stories that shaped his childhood, only to discover that from that place—from which, like old Huckleberry Finn, he always wanted to escape—he never truly left, no matter how far his future wanderings would take him.