Dennis Covington

When April Hunt moves to St. Simon Island, Georgia, to live with her father, a recovering alcoholic, she becomes involved with an illegal alien from El Salvador and learns about his life and country.

It is Scottsboro, Alabama, in the fall of 1991. A snake-handling preacher by the name of Glendel Buford Summerford has just tried to murder his wife, Darlene, by snakebite. At gunpoint, he forces her to stick her arm in a box of rattlesnakes. She is bitten twice and nearly dies. The trial, which becomes a sensation throughout southern Appalachia, echoes familiar themes from a troubled secular world - marital infidelity, spouse abuse, and alcoholism - but it also raises questions about faith, forgiveness, redemption, and, of course, snakes. Glenn Summerford is convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. . When Dennis Covington covered the trial of Glenn Summerford for The New York Times, a world far beyond the trial opened up to him. Salvation on Sand Mountain begins with a crime and a trial and then becomes an extraordinary exploration of a place, a people, and an author's descent into himself. The place is southern Appalachia - a country deep and unsettled, where the past and its culture collide with the economic and social realities of the present, leaving a residue of rootlessness, anxiety, and lawlessness. All-night video stores and tanning salons stand next to collapsed chicken farms and fundamentalist churches. The people are poor southern whites. Peculiar and insular, they are hill people of Scotch-Irish descent: religious mystics who cast out demons, speak in tongues, drink strychnine, run blowtorches up their arms, and drape themselves with rattlesnakes. There is Charles McGlocklin, the End-Time Evangelist; Cecil Esslinder, the red headed guitar player with the perpetual grin; Aunt Daisy, the prophetess; Brother Carl Porter; Elvis Presley Saylor; Gracie McAllister; Dewey Chafin; and the legendary Punkin Brown, all of whose faith illuminates these pages. And then there is Dennis Covington, himself Scotch-Irish, whose own family came down off of Sand Mountain two generations ago to work in the steel mills of Birmingham, and who, in uncovering records of snake-handling Covingtons, decides to take up serpents himself. With grace and humor and exquisite writing, Dennis Covington explores a physical and spiritual geography few readers will be prepared for. Reminiscent of the best of Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and James Agee, Salvation on Sand Mountain is southern literature at its best.

Told in the authors' alternating voices, Cleaving is both the story and the understory of a marriage, unique in its particulars but universal in its resonance. Childhood acquaintances, Vicki and Dennis meet again in their twenties and wed. Like many of their generation, they "promise each other nothing" and get more than they'd bargained for: alcoholism, infidelity, infertility, uncertainty. Gradually, tumult gives way to sobriety, parenthood, and meaningful work, but a sense of yearning remains. In a quest to root themselves in the larger world, they embark on a mission to hand-drill water wells in Central America, attempting to slake a spiritual thirst by addressing a practical need.

Every advanced society in the galaxy relies on the technology of the Protheans, an ancient species that vanished fifty thousand years ago. After discovering a cache of Prothean technology on Mars in 2148, humanity is spreading to the stars; the newest interstellar species, struggling to carve out its place in the greater galactic community.On the edge of colonized space, ship commander and Alliance war hero David Anderson investigates the remains of a top secret military research station; smoking ruins littered with bodies and unanswered questions. Who attacked this post and for what purpose? And where is Kahlee Sanders, the young scientist who mysteriously vanished from the base--hours before her colleagues were slaughtered?Sanders is now the prime suspect, but finding her creates more problems for Anderson than it solves. Partnered with a rogue alien agent he can't trust and pursued by an assassin he can't escape, Anderson battles impossible odds on uncharted worlds to uncover a sinister conspiracy . . . one he won't live to tell about. Or so the enemy thinks.From the Paperback edition.

Sent by his guardian to live at a Louisiana school for retarded boys, Lizard, a bright, deformed youngster, escapes with the help of a visiting actor who gives him a role in his repertory company's production of "The Tempest."