Silas Gault

Marcus Webb is not from Holt, Tennessee. He came in 1994 on a two-year fellowship and never left. He's fifty-eight now, a local historian, beloved for his county history, accepted in the way small towns accept outsiders who choose to stay. He catalogs the Holt family papers after Eleanor Holt's death, working methodically through the ledgers and letters and deeds. At the bottom of the miscellany box, he finds a cedar document box. Inside is a covenant dated March 14, 1823—two weeks before the town's founding. The parties: Ezekiel Holt, acting for himself and his blood descendants in perpetuity, and "the Appetite of this Ground, being the sovereign claim of the land itself." The terms: annual tribute, rendered at winter's end, upon the last night of February. The tribute shall take the form of "a life freely given or a life taken in forfeit, the blood returned to the soil from which all grows." In exchange, the Appetite shall restrain itself from its ordinary claims upon the settlement—flood, drought, fire, pestilence—and the town shall prosper. Marcus is a historian. He's seen folk contracts before—compacts with land spirits, agreements with local genius loci. He catalogs the document under Folk and Cultural History and moves on. But the town doesn't let him move on. Because Holt, Tennessee has been visibly well for two hundred years—storefronts occupied, roads maintained, the school expanded, the library thriving. In a region where small towns are dying, Holt has prospered. And Marcus Webb, decent man, careful scholar, is about to discover that the covenant was not superstition. The tribute is still being paid. The rats in the sub-basement of the old hardware store are not behaving like rats. The founding families—the ones who have been here since before the Civil War—have been keeping their promise. The Vermin Gospel is Southern gothic horror about a man who loves a place that has secrets, about the moral position of discovering that a community's warmth and its d