Publisher's Synopsis
It's a hot Saturday night on Bluetick Mountain in August 1906. Sweat pours off of Buford Elrod Applegate who narrowly misses getting bit as he pulls "Lula" from a box of slithering serpents and begins to dance around waving her high above his head. Tambourines shake and snake buttons rattle as out of tune guitars torture the same three chords over and over again. It's just another normal Saturday evening down at the Sweet God of Fire Full Gospel Canebrake Apostolic Church. Across the way however...Doctor Henry Whitehouse gently pulls the sheet up to cover Sarah Foster's face for the last time. Standing at a distance, her husband clinches his teeth, snarling at the doctor who had just pronounced his wife dead.The next morning's edition of the Bluetick Mountain Gazette announces that snakebite has claimed yet another victim, but there's more to this story than the newspaper clipping reveals.Things are not always as they seem on Bluetick Mountain. As twilight brings yet another day to a close, a Dark Visitor comes slithering in as well. He's come at the unintended invitation of Sylvester Adam Decker who has been calling for him ever since his wife passed long about ten years now. Very soon, utter Darkness will descend over the rolling hills and valleys of Bluetick Mountain even while the sun is yet in the sky.The Deal Maker's book has many empty pages on which he intends to write the names of all the souls ripe for the picking from his visit to this Mountain, and before he is done, his wicked pen will run dry. But there is one; there is always one it seems, who stands in opposition to him. And this time, this "one" has more to offer more than a soul, more to lose than a life, this time... this "one," is his very own daughter, and she is mad as Hell.Deals will be made, and souls will be taken, and when it's all said and done, if Heaven looks away...there will be Hell to pay."...for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
