The Story Behind Dust and Mercy

Some novels begin with an idea. This one began with a question that wouldn't leave me alone.

What happens to a community when the faith it publicly professes meets something that actually costs something? Not a dramatic test — not war or catastrophe — but the quiet, ordinary kind of reckoning that arrives in the form of a neighbor in trouble, a boundary dispute, a stranger on a back road. The kind of test that good people fail not out of malice but out of the careful distances they've constructed between what they believe and what they're willing to do.

That question became Hollow Ridge, Kentucky. 1959. Eli McKinnon and the valley he inherited.

Why Appalachia

I chose the Appalachian setting deliberately. There is something about that landscape — the particular relationship between people and land, between generations and inheritance, between community and silence — that makes moral questions visible in ways that other settings don't. The land isn't backdrop in this novel. It's pressure. It shapes what these characters believe they owe each other and what they believe they can afford to withhold.

The 1959 setting matters too. It sits at a hinge point — before the full force of the civil rights movement reshapes the moral landscape of the South, but after enough of modernity has arrived to make the old certainties feel fragile. A community still organized around inherited faith, inherited land, and inherited neighborliness — and a coal company that has learned exactly how to use all three against itself.

The Good Samaritan

The novel is built on Luke 10:25-37. Not as allegory — the characters aren't symbols — but as architecture. The parable asks a question that communities have been quietly avoiding for two thousand years: who is my neighbor, and what does that actually cost me?

Hollow Ridge is a community that has answered that question in advance, quietly and collectively, in ways that ensure the answer never gets too expensive. Dust and Mercy is about what happens when the question arrives anyway.

What I Was Trying to Do

I didn't want to write a novel about hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is too easy — it lets everyone off the hook by making the failure a character flaw rather than a structural one. What I wanted to write about was something harder: the way good people, sincere people, people who genuinely believe what they say they believe, construct the conditions under which their beliefs will never actually be tested.

That's a more uncomfortable story. I hope it generates more honest conversation.

For Readers and Discussion Groups

If you're reading Dust and Mercy with a book club or discussion group, visit the Book Club Guides page for discussion questions. For press inquiries, author appearances, or to arrange a virtual Q&A, visit the Press Kit page or contact us directly at contact@summitandshorepublishing.com.

Dust and Mercy is available for pre-order now. Release date: August 7, 2026.