Over the Plain Houses

Over the Plain Houses

<div><b>"A spellbinding story of witchcraft and disobedience." - NPR</b></div><div>     </div>It's 1939 and the federal government has sent USDA agent Virginia Furman into the North Carolina mountains to instruct families on modernizing their homes and farms.<br /><br />There she meets farm wife Irenie Lambey, who is immediately drawn to the lady agent's self-possession.Already, cracks are emerging in Irenie's fragile marriage to Brodis, an ex-logger turned fundamentalist preacher: She has taken to night ramblings through the woods to escape her husband's bed, storing strange keepsakes in a mountain cavern. To Brodis, these are all the signs that Irenie--tiptoeing through the dark in her billowing white nightshirt--is practicing black magic. <br /><br />When Irenie slips back into bed with a kind of supernatural stealth, Brodis senses that a certain evil has entered his life, linked to thelady agent, or perhaps to other, more sinister forces.<br /><br />Working in the stylistic terrain of Amy Greene and Bonnie Jo Campbell, this mesmerizing debut by Julia Franks is the story of a woman intrigued by the possibility of change, escape, and reproductive choice--stalked by aBible-haunted man who fears his government and stakes his integrity upon an older way of life. As Brodis chases his demons, he brings about a final act of violence that shakes the entire valley. In this spellbinding Southern story, Franks bares the myths and mysteries that modernity can't quite dispel.