Where Trouble Sleeps

1. How would you characterize Stephen's relationship with each of his parents? With his church and his religion? 2. What prospects of stability are offered to the community by the church? Instability? 3. How is the church important to Jack Umstead? 4. How is the setting (1950s, rural community) important to the story? 5. What might Alease see in Jack Umstead and why? Does he have any redeeming qualities? If so, what are they? 6. Discuss the significance of the title. 7. How are the major characters and the community changed by Umstead's visit? 8. How does shifting point of view aid or hinder your reading of this story? 9. How might a year-2000 visit by Jack Umstead to Listre, North Carolina, be different from the 1952 visit in Where Trouble Sleeps ? 10. How were your childhood views of God and religion different from those of Stephen? 11. How will Stephen's experiences as a child in Where Trouble Sleeps influence his life as an adolescent? As an adult? Which of the adults in the novel will he most resemble as an adult? 12. What events or experiences in your own childhood could become the basis for a novel?

"What Garrison Keillor has done for Lake Wobegon, Edgerton has done for Listre, creating a place of battered charms and dog-eared lore."
--The Washington Post

"Here, evil comes to sleepy Listre, N.C., circa 1950, in the form of a stranger with a pencil-thin mustache and a trunkful of dirty movies. Listre is the kind of rustic crossroads where the most exciting event in years was a collision between a mule and a pickup truck, where boys slip over to the Gulf station for a Nehi and a peek at the pinup calendar, and where everybody knows everybody else's secrets. It's the kind of place, in other words, where it seems like nothing ever changes--until the fateful day when everything changes at once."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Hilarious . . . Wonderful . . . Edgerton engagingly captures small-town America."
--Atlanta Journal & Constitution

"As much the story of a man who brings random badness into a good place as it is the story of a boy's search for his own salvation."
--Mark Childress
The New York Times Book Review

"His best book since Walking Across Egypt."
--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"A wonderful gallery of comic characters . . . In Clyde Edgerton, Southern Baptists have found a laureate to uncover their rich humor and humanity and to share without condescension or condemnation."
--The Boston Globe

"Side-splittingly funny . . . Clyde Edgerton is the love child of Dave Barry and Flannery O'Connor."
--Raleigh News and Observer