Pew

A congregation in a small, unnamed town in the American South arrives for a service and finds a stranger asleep on a pew. The person is genderless, racially ambiguous and will not speak. One family takes the visitor in and calls them Pew.

The town is busy preparing for a Forgiveness Festival, and over the week Pew passes from one household to the next. The townspeople are earnest and seem well-meaning. Each of them sees a different identity in Pew, and many unload their fears and secrets in conversations where nobody answers back.

Pew listens and watches. Now and then brief flashes of past lives or hints about where they came from surface. Whether Pew is a devil, an angel or something else is left open for most of the book.

As the days pass, the silence at the center of the town starts to unsettle people. Early generosity wears away into suspicion and menace. The week builds toward a violent, disturbing climax at the Forgiveness Festival, where larger truths matter more than the question of what Pew is.

The book is unsettling and allegorical in tone, with a slow, creeping dread. Its narrator is a blank presence who takes in the community's confessions and says nothing.