Elizabeth Massie works her horror effects with an intimate approach, closing in on her characters as if she's trapping them. The focus of the novel, though, is on the well-evoked mood of fear and despair. As Joel searches for the real perpetrator of the crimes, along with other adolescents who reluctantly listen to him, the plot (the weakest part of the book) begins to resemble a wandering sort of whodunit. When the sineater's son, Joel, is allowed to attend school, a series of violent omens convinces the fanatic locals that God is punishing them and that Judgment Day is nigh. He performs the valuable service of absorbing all the sins of each person who dies, by eating ritual food laid out on their corpses.
The sineater is a man shunned by all, a man whose face should never be seen. This grim, claustral story is about the consequences of a primitive form of Christianity practiced in the mountains of Virginia, the author's home state.
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