Where the Heathen Rage

The baby was still alive when Hollis Koker found her stuffed inside a hollow log on the side of Little Black Mountain, screaming into the dark.

In a coal town where the trains have stopped running and the union line is the only thing holding men together, Hollis is already living on the edge of extinction. The strike has taken his work. The mountain is being picked clean. Faith shouts through the night from a windowless church where men handle serpents and promise salvation in fire. All he has left is the small, fragile life he shares with his wife, Anna, in a hand-me-down house with two chairs at the kitchen table, just the two of them against the world.

Anna calls the child a miracle. Hollis calls her a burden.

But in a place where the past is never buried, the abandoned baby draws together lives that were never meant to meet: a teenage girl with a secret she cannot outrun, a zealot preacher drunk on power and prophecy, a sheriff who believes order is the same thing as justice, and a people who have survived for generations by clawing a living from the mountain's black heart.

As violence gathers and old reckonings rise to the surface, Hollis must decide what can be saved and what must be sacrificed.

Where the Heathen Rage is a fierce Southern novel about inheritance and redemption, the wages of faith and the cost of love, and the fragile, stubborn hope that survives when nearly everything else has been taken.

STACY DEAN CAMPBELL is a novelist and songwriter whose work explores the landscapes, labor, faith, and contradictions of the modern South and Southwest. His fiction draws from the landscapes and lives of ordinary people navigating grief, love, regret, and survival. He lives in Nashville, TN.