Sitting up with Mr. Bellwether

The first thing Earl Pritchard learned about sitting up with the dead was that nobody ever called it a funeral. A funeral had flowers, a preacher, and coffee cake. Sitting up with the dead was what happened after the respectable people went home—when someone had to watch the body through the night.

On the last Friday night of October 1957, Earl Pritchard takes the job for twenty dollars, despite a mountain of bad feelings. Arriving at the leaning, eerie Bellwether estate deep in the Alabama woods, he finds the late Orville Bellwether resting in a dark-oak coffin. But this isn't an ordinary wake: the coffin is wrapped in heavy hemp rope, sitting on wheels on a crooked floor, and guarded by the dead man's unbothered widow, Martha, and Earl's sleep-prone cousin, Leon.

When knocking sounds, snapping ropes, and a rolling coffin spiral into complete madness, Earl finds himself in a desperate battle against physics, local superstition, and a body that simply refuses to stay put. Sitting Up with Mr. Bellwether is a hilarious, atmospheric dark comedy that proves some night shifts are never worth the money.