Emergency Instructions

Renee Harvell is bewildered by the South. People are named Peck Titsworth, for Christ's sake, and every curve in the road hides a dead dog or a "Prepare to meet God" or a "Trust The One Who Bled For You" sign. Emergency Instructions opens with the young Harvell family's arrival in Arkansas during the "summer of death," and follows their struggle to survive in a place where "practitioners of backwoods witchcraft are as common as Methodists and sometimes one in the same."

Joey's been hired as ...