In a night of horror and transformation, Horace's unexpectedly real demons tear his soul from his naked body and spirit it back to the stations of his life: the church dominated by his aunts and his grandfather, the school that taught him the magic of learning, the forbidden pleasures of sex, and the dreams that have become his hell.

Horace's older cousin, the Reverend James Green, lives the tradition that Horace feels he has betrayed, but James occupies a limbo of his own. Haunted by his awkward attempts to help Horace and by the ghost of his dead wife, he fears that in satisfying his family's hopes he has denied his own promise.

Through the pain and anger of these two younger Crosses -- as well as that of the two oldest, Ruth and Zeke -- emerge the complex and sustaining truths of four generations of a black family's life in the South -- and an urgent new view of the South's future. With humor and with love, Randall Kenan calls up a world of powerful tradition, passionate struggle, and devastating transformation.