A Prayer for the Dying

Set in leafy Friendship, Wisconsin, just after the Civil War, A Prayer for the Dying opens harmlessly on a languid summer day. Only slowly do events reveal themselves as sinister and bloom gently into a shared nightmare, as one neighbor after another succombs to a creeping, always fatal disease. Jacob Hansen is Friendship's sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, a man with a large heart and conscience. As the disease engulfs his town, breeding hysteria, Jacob must find a humane way to save those he loves, short of calling a full quarantine and boarding up the sick in their houses. And what of the tramps slipping nightly through the tinder-dry woods, and the spiritualists from the city camped on the edge of town with their charismatic leader, Chase?

A Prayer for the Dying is a rare and scary book, Stewart O'Nan's most astounding achievement yet, a sunlit Gothic painted in shimmering prose.