Hillbilly Exorcist

Father Patrick O'Brien didn't expect his exile to a dying Appalachian coal town to involve actual demons. Assigned to manage three failing parishes in Stillwater Holler, Kentucky, the overworked Boston priest is just trying to keep the lights on and the coffee hot. His biggest problems are supposed to be dwindling attendance, a hostile bishop, and Tammy Faye's relentless matchmaking at the Blessed Bean café. Then Jed Messer—a sixty-seven-year-old regular at the VFW with a bad back—throws a grown man across a room, speaks in voices that aren't his own, and levitates during Father O'Brien's fumbling attempt at exorcism. It gets worse from there. What starts as one possession becomes seven. Then fifteen. Then dozens. The nightmares spread through town like wildfire. Children's eyes go black during Sunday Mass. The entity—ancient, strategic, and terrifyingly patient—has been waiting seventy years for the seals on Mine Shaft #7 to break. Now it's free, and it's hungry. Father O'Brien quickly realizes he's in over his head. His Latin prayers fail. The diocese won't help. And the thing in the mine is smarter than any demon he studied in seminary—it feeds on isolation, division, and despair, turning neighbors against each other while it picks them off one by one. His unlikely salvation comes from the last person he'd expect: Memaw Bracken, a sharp-tongued Baptist moonshiner whose folk magic knowledge makes the Church nervous. She's buried one husband in these mountains, lost an aunt to the mine in 1952, and she's not about to let some "jumped-up demon" take her town without a fight. Together with a nun who survived a massacre, a skeptical geologist, a poetry-writing deputy, and a ragtag coalition of Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, and folk practitioners, Father O'Brien must do the impossible: unite a fractured community across denominational lines before the entity consumes them all. But unity comes with a price. The 1952 sealing required six people to sacrifice themselves, staying in the mine forever to hold the darkness back. As the final confrontation approaches and the entity's true nature is revealed, Father O'Brien must confront a terrible question: how do you defeat an evil that's already won when the only solution requires someone to pay the ultimate cost? Part The Exorcist, part Midnight Mass, with the dark humor of Good Omens and the authentic Appalachian voice of Silas House, HILLBILLY EXORCIST is a 64,000-word comedic supernatural thriller about the power of community, the complexities of faith, and two women who prove that sometimes the most unlikely partnerships—a Catholic nun and a Baptist moonshiner—shine the brightest light in the darkest places. Because when evil comes to the holler, blessed salt and holy water work better together.