A Land More Kind than Home

One Sunday, nine-year-old Jess secretly witnesses his autistic brother being smothered to death during a healing service in the mountains of North Carolina. Sheriff Clem Barefield arrives to find a group of believers who have moved the boy’s body and won’t speak of his death. At the center of the mystery is Carson Chambliss, a snake-handling ex-convict turned preacher whose past is as mysterious as the power he claims to possess. The sheriff turns to church matriarch Adelaide Lyle, whose beliefs straddle the divide between blind faith and cold fact. Her understanding of both the spiritual and the natural world makes her predictions of a violent reckoning in the wake of the death just as viable as they are unavoidable. Jess is the lynchpin for this violence, and he tries to navigate an adult world in which the truth is hidden from children, even if they know things adults do not.