Recent widower and
Catholic deacon J. Kerry Logan spends his nights alone in his church engaged in
a drunken one-way dialogue with the wooden jesus who lives on the crucifix
three stories up the altar wall. As a six-foot-eleven seventy-year-old
Irishman, he is only the third oddest creature in The Church of St. Thomas the
Doubter once it is invaded by two strange boys. Built of broken fragments
of the Christian faith he feels dying in him, they claim ownership of the
church and make a declaration: Night is falling—Sondown is near!
As their encounter lasts
and a friendship takes root, Deacon Logan feels himself drawn further and
further out of his old world and into What Comes After, which is either the
deepest betrayal of his faith or a desperate attempt at its renewal. His
identity as a deacon, his church, and even Christianity itself seem to depend
on the appalling yet beautiful way these boys destroy and transform the
thousand crucifixes they collect from the small lumber town down the
hill.
