John, the Baptist

About the Book

John Christianson, a newly ordained minister, anticipates being called to a humble life of service in one of the many country churches that tower above the plains of his native South Dakota. When he is responsible for his wife’s accidental death on their honeymoon, he recovers from a coma to find—if he can trust his wits—that she is somehow beckoning from a shadowy borderland at the edge of perception—a borderland haunted by demons and angels.

The doctors have a term for it: schizotypal personality disorder. His father, in typical Dakota fashion, is blunt: madness. His mother-in-law doesn’t care what it’s called—as long as she can taste revenge for the death of her daughter. Only the town pariah sees—or thinks he sees—a supernatural menace that stalks John’s every move.

Tormented by guilt and trained by the seminary for a contemporary agnostic ministry in an inherited but untested faith, John finds himself woefully unprepared to meet the seductive cunning of an ancient enemy weaving an intricate web of deception. Fleeing to the Dakota Badlands, a tortured moonscape where a starving Lakota people once danced in a mad and frenzied effort to save their native religion from an alien culture, John performs his own Ghost Dance only to discover that many are called, but few are chosen.

About the Author

Keith Husmann lives in California.