The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival....

It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed - within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defense is three women, on a farm at the...

To the Chandler family in 1950's Black Oak, Arkansas, the cotton season means hard work, an influx of temporary workers -- and a host of complications. Hank Spruill, one of the hired hands has a violent temper that has gotten him into trouble with the law. Tally, his sister, is smitten with Cowboy, a Mexican laborer Hank despises. And with all the turmoil, 7-year-old Luke Chandler has seen a lot more than most kids his age.

The adventures of a spirited boy growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century, as he tries a new method for curing warts, witnesses a murder, runs away to an island and pretends to be a pirate, watches his own funeral, and falls for the new girl in the neighborhood.

Henry Childs is just seventeen when he falls into a love affair so intense it nearly destroys him. To escape the wrath of the young girl's father, Henry joins the Marines, arriving in Korea on the eve of the brutal battle of the Chosin Reservoir-the defining moment of the Korean War. There he confronts an enemy force far beyond the scope of his imagining, but the challenges he meets upon his return home, scarred and haunted, are greater by far. From...