Books Worth Reading

A Prayer for the Dying, Stewart O’Nan (1999)

High summer and Friendship’s quiet. The men tend the shimmering fields. Children tramp the woods, wade the creeks, sound the cool ponds. In town, women pause in the heavy air of the millinery, linger over bolts of yard goods, barrels of clumped flour. The only sound’s the freight drumming through to the south, tossing its plume of cinders above the treetops, the trucks clicking a mile off. Then quiet, the buzz of insects, the breathless afternoon. Cows twitch and flick.

It is shortly after the end of the American Civil War in Friendship, Wisconsin. As the sheriff, preacher and undertaker, Jacob is in charge of the physical, moral and spiritual welfare of the his town. But when the town is threatened first by disease, then fire, he realizes that safeguarding the town and its citizens is beyond a man’s control.

A Prayer for the Dying is a quiet novel of creeping horror, as death creeps and then roars through Friendship, and Jacob strives grimly to stave it off. In the process, he finds himself questioning everything he believes, even to the bedrock of his faith, that the world is ultimately a beautiful place. This book is haunting, evocative of a time and place, as well as of a man’s character.