ABOUT
THE BOOK

Dark, poetic, and chilling, A Prayer for the Dying asks if it’s possible to be a good man in a time of madness. 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, bloom gently into a shared nightmare, as one neighbor after another succumbs to a creeping, always fatal disease.

Our sole witness to this epidemic is Jacob Hansen, 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? Who will bury the dead properly, if not Jacob?