The Birch family has kept a covenant with something living in a cave on their mountain in the Smokies since the 1930s. Each generation supplies a girl who goes into the dark to receive from it, and Stella was the best they ever had. She got out at fifteen, and by 1948 she’s running moonshine in Chattanooga and staying away. Then her grandmother dies and she goes back to find a nine-year-old girl being prepared for the same work. Gregory grew up around that country and writes the family church, the whiskey, and the hollers straight, which makes the god in the cave land harder.
Revelator