NOW SEEKING REPRESENTATION FOR DEBUT NOVEL

Forty-two-year-old Boston Globe reporter Clark Browning is burning out—marriage faltering, checked-out children, suicide note on draft three—when his editor sends him to Barne, New Hampshire to cover a Christian-flavored cult going mainstream: the Fellowship of the Holy Oak. In Barne, Clark meets Leonard Branch, an intellectually magnetic pastor whose theology reframes his failures as signs of spiritual potential. What begins as a filler assignment becomes Clark’s last shot at professional relevance.

As a blizzard of biblical proportions bears down, Clark chooses to embed with Holy Oak, leaving his family in Boston, and his perception quickly collides with reality. A sheriff’s “suicide” looks staged. The innkeeper is found headless. Parishioners slip into the church’s back corridors and don’t return. Leonard draws Clark from observer to participant, culminating in a clandestine rite beneath the church—drums, a slaughtered goat, and Nelly Marshall strapped to a gurney. Drugged and scrubbed from the scene, Clark wakes to a town reset for the National Guard and a quiet directive in Leonard’s hand: Get out of Barne. Now. Go, and write your masterpiece. Clark must choose: expose what he’s seen and risk retaliation from a movement that erases its own footprints, or launder Leonard into myth and claim the career-saving book.

Exploring the psychology of faith, the ethics of narrative control, and what it means to seek transcendence in a decaying world, LESSER GODS blends the lyrical dissection of isolated communities in Paul Harding’s THIS OTHER EDEN, the voice-driven moral unraveling of Julia May Jonas’s VLADIMIR, and the surreal, spiritual horror of Rivers Solomon’s SORROWLAND.