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Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect hymn. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once “are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it died of a broken heart.Yet, more than anything else folks ponder in the town of Trinity, one question why did this angel-toned preacher’s son, just as his fame seemed ready to light the Appalachian nightsky forever, disappear completely?In 1938, the decisions Saul makes will alter his family’s story for generations. He and his eerily talented descendants ignite religious fear throughout Red Pine County. They navigate chapels, decaying sanatoriums, high school hallways, and a lingering myth from their Cherokee heritage that follows them wherever they go. In the end, however, it’s Saul’s precocious grandson, Eli, who must find answers to these heartbreaking questions, who must enter this world rich in music and voices, where people die to hear the unspoken, and salvation is only found in the not-yet sung.
Jordan Dotson is the author of the 2024 novel The Ballad of Falling Rock. His short stories, criticism, and literary translation have appeared in publications throughout the US, China, Singapore, and Japan. In 2019 he received the Scoundrel Time Editor’s Prize, and the same year his lone screenplay won the Jury Award in Narrative Shorts at more than thirty film festivals worldwide. He lives in Boston.
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect hymn. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once “are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it died of a broken heart.Yet, more than anything else folks ponder in the town of Trinity, one question why did this angel-toned preacher’s son, just as his fame seemed ready to light the Appalachian nightsky forever, disappear completely?In 1938, the decisions Saul makes will alter his family’s story for generations. He and his eerily talented descendants ignite religious fear throughout Red Pine County. They navigate chapels, decaying sanatoriums, high school hallways, and a lingering myth from their Cherokee heritage that follows them wherever they go. In the end, however, it’s Saul’s precocious grandson, Eli, who must find answers to these heartbreaking questions, who must enter this world rich in music and voices, where people die to hear the unspoken, and salvation is only found in the not-yet sung.
Jordan Dotson is the author of the 2024 novel The Ballad of Falling Rock. His short stories, criticism, and literary translation have appeared in publications throughout the US, China, Singapore, and Japan. In 2019 he received the Scoundrel Time Editor’s Prize, and the same year his lone screenplay won the Jury Award in Narrative Shorts at more than thirty film festivals worldwide. He lives in Boston.
