Dominion

Citchens debuts with a stellar Southern drama of secrets and sin, revolving around a Baptist preacher and his family. Rev. Sabre Winfrey Jr. is Dominion, Miss.’s most prominent citizen, the linchpin of the Black community, and the owner of a barbershop, radio station, and blocks of real estate. He’s also one hell of a letch. (As Citchens wryly puts it, he “believed without a shadow of a doubt that an idle mind was the devil’s workshop, but an idle hand belonged on a behind.”) Indeed, Sabre’s sermons provide scant cover for the philandering his highly medicated wife Priscilla is powerless to rein in. But Dominion’s “First Lady” has an even bigger problem: her youngest son, Emmanuel, better known as Wonderboy—a star quarterback with the singing voice of an angel—has taken up with 17-year-old Diamond Bailey, a “worldy hussy” in Priscilla’s eyes. Neither she nor Diamond know how depraved Wonderboy has become or where he goes when he disappears at night, and their efforts to protect him risk repeating the sins of the father as Citchens reveals the snake coiled in the heart of Dominion’s prelapsarian garden. This Faulknerian, God-troubled novel is an earthly scorcher shot through with unforgettable images (here’s Priscilla describing a church banquet where tickets for seating in “heaven” and “hell” were priced according to their value: “Hell was packed, but there was only one full table in heaven”). Readers will be stunned. (Aug.)