The Swine of Gadarenes

For two years, the people of Gadara, Missouri have learned not to look at the cemetery on the eastern edge of town. Not to listen on the nights when something screams between two and four in the morning. Not to ask what the county lab technician found in the crypt that sent her home for three days and sealed her mouth for good. Not to wonder why the farmer's four hundred pigs press together in the far corner of their lots every night and shake in absolute silence.Nora Ellison, waitress, early shift, has learned all of this and more. She has learned the particular discipline of a town that has decided, collectively and without discussion, that survival requires a certain amount of deliberate blindness.Then a quiet stranger arrives one October morning. And Nora, against every instinct she has carefully cultivated, follows him to see what happens next.