Fielding Bliss has never forgotten the long, crazy summer of 1984 when a heat wave scorched Breathed, Ohio. It was the year he became friends with the devil.
Sal seems to appear out of nowhere—a bruised and tattered thirteen-year-old boy claiming to be the devil himself answering an invitation. Fielding Bliss, the son of a local prosecutor, brings him home, where he’s welcomed into the Bliss family, assuming he’s a runaway from a nearby farm town.
When word spreads that the devil has come to Breathed, not everyone is happy to welcome this self-proclaimed fallen angel. Murmurs follow him and tensions rise along with the temperatures, as an unbearable heat wave rolls into town right along with him. As strange accidents start to occur, riled by the feverish heat, some in the town start to believe that Sal is exactly who he claims to be. While the Bliss family wrestles with their own personal demons, a fanatic drives the town to the brink of a catastrophe that will change this sleepy Ohio backwater forever.
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“Reads as if Carson McCullers and Shirley Jackson got together with Nathaniel Hawthorne…to write the first truly great gothic coming-of-age novel of the twenty-first century.”
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Donald Ray Pollock, PEN/Robert Bingham Award–winning author