Damnation Falls: A Novel

Randall Wilkes, his big-city journalism career in ruins, has returned after twenty years to Pilgrim's Rest, the Tennessee hill town where he grew up. He has taken on a lucrative but low-prestige writing job for Sonny McMahan, a former governor and Randall's boyhood friend, whose own career is under a shadow and who needs a ghost-written autobiography to ease his way back into politics.

Randall encounters Faye McMahan, Sonny's mother, who is addled with age, imagining that her dead husband ...