Phenomenal debut

Religious fanatics are per se bad enough, but really dangerous are those who know that what they preach is dangerous nonsense, and exploit the infantile credulity of their fellow men. "A country More Than Child Home" gives us the opportunity to even watch the evil in his work in the American Bible Belt.

We are experiencing a week in rural North Carolina 80s. A week in the life of a small parish with an unusual mission statement: "And these signs shall follow them that believe;; In my name shall they cast out devils, speak with new tongues, take up serpents, and they bit Deadly drink, it shall not hurt them; on the sick they shall lay hands, so it is better to be with them "(Mark 16: 17-18 - and behold, you can find it in the New Testament, when one of the dark side of faith interested).

Three-person narrator, the novel: Jess, the little boy who loves his dumb brother Stump about everything and guilty but to him; Adelaide, the old midwife of the village, which has gone several years ago for a reason to distance from the church, but is still under the spell of the pastor; and Clem, the sheriff and police officers of the old school, who makes every effort to keep the escalation of events under control. The motives of other main characters as the mother whose religious delusion prevents them to protect their child, or the pastor, who has his own agenda, we only guess from the outside. What the small Stump feels for all that, we do not know. At the end of the week a family is destroyed, and yet distinguished on the horizon from a silver lining, from a direction from which one would hardly have expected.

Wiley Cash's novel is a brilliant first novel, written thrilling and exciting to the last page. He paints a sinister picture of excesses of American religious freedom and of what can happen when a charismatic manipulator on a herd meets people who use their heads rather than to faith to think.