A taut, otherworldly, and moving literary thriller investigating the contemporary aftermath of Mormonism's shrouded and violent past. When Rudd, a troubled teenager, embarks on a school research project, he runs across the secret Mormon ritual of blood sacrifice, and its role in a 1902 murder committed by the grandson of Brigham Young. Along with his newly discovered half-brother, Rudd becomes swept up in the psychological and atavistic effects of this violent, antique ritual. As the past and the present become an increasingly tangled knot, Rudd is found-with minor injuries and few memories-at the scene of a multiple murder on a remote campsite. Lyndi, the daughter of the victims, tries to help Rudd recover his memory and, together, they find a strength unique to survivors of terrible tragedies. But Rudd, desperate to protect Lyndi and unable to let the past be still, tries to manipulate their Mormon wedding ceremony to trick the priests (and God) by giving himself and Lyndi new secret names-names that match the killer and the victim in the one hundred-year-old murder. The nightmare has just begun...
"There's a touch of the time-shifting of Lost Highway in here, and the colors of Suspiria, and the soundtrack of Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, and a whole other strange register which throughout it all just seems like a calm story dictated to you by a stranger in your sleep."
Vice
"A contemporary gothic tale about the apocalyptic connection between religion and violence."
Publishers Weekly
"Evenson's fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental, and violent. It can be soul-shaking."
