A troubled Episcopal priest and would-be activist, Malcolm Walker has failed twice over - first in an effort to shock his New England congregants out of their complacency and second in an attempt at suicide. Discharged from the hospital and haunted by images of the Iraq War and Abu Ghraib, he heads home to the mountains of northwestern South Carolina, the state's 'dark corner', where a gathering storm of private grief and public rage awaits him.

MARK POWELL is the author of two previous novels published by the University of Tennessee Press, Prodigals and the Peter Taylor Prize-winning Blood Kin. The recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Breadloaf Writers' Conference fellowships, as well as the Chaffin Award for fiction, he is an assistant professor of English at Stetson University.