A Prayer for the Dying asks if it’s possible to be a good man in a time of madness. Set in leafy Friendship, Wisconsin, just after the Civil War, A Prayer for the Dying opens on a languid summer day; only slowly do events reveal themselves as sinister, blooming into a shared nightmare, as one neighbor after another succumbs to a creeping, always fatal disease. The sole witness to this epidemic is Jacob Hansen, Friendship’s sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, a man with a large heart and conscience. As the disease engulfs his town, breeding hysteria, Jacob must find a humane way to save those he loves, short of calling up a full quarantine and boarding up the sick in their houses. And what of the tramps slipping nightly through the tinder dry woods, and the spiritualists on the edge of town with their charismatic leaders, Chase? Who will bury the dead properly, if not Jacob?
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