The Churchgoer
A Novel
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Soon to be a an FX series starring and produced by Matthew McConaughey
A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of Summer
"The Churchgoer is a wonderful debut novel from a writer with more than a few tricks up his sleeve.”--Los Angeles Times
A haunting debut literary noir about a former pastor’s search to find a missing woman in the toxic, contradictory underbelly of southern California.
“He was finished with church, with God, with all of it. But to find the girl, he has to go back.”
In Mark Haines’s former life, he was an evangelical youth pastor, a role model, and a family man—until he abandoned his wife, his daughter, and his beliefs. Now he’s marking time between sunny days surfing and dark nights working security at an industrial complex. His isolation is broken when Cindy, a charming twenty-two-year old drifter he sees hitchhiking on the Pacific Coast Highway, hustles him for a breakfast and a place to crash—two cynical kindred spirits.
Then his co-worker is murdered in a robbery gone wrong and Cindy disappears on the same night. Haines knows he should let it go and return to his safe life of solitude. Instead, he’s driven to find out where Cindy went, under stranger and stranger circumstances. Soon Mark is chasing leads, each one taking him back into a world where his old life came crashing down—into the seedier side of southern California’s drug trade and ultimately into the secrets of an Evangelical megachurch where his past and his future are about to converge. What begins as an investigation becomes a haunting mystery and a psychological journey both for Mark, and for the elusive young stranger he won’t let get away.
Set in the early 2000s, The Churchgoer is a gripping noir, a quiet subversion of the genre, and a powerful meditation on belief, morality, and the nature of evil in contemporary life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mark Haines, the tortured narrator of Coleman's provocative debut novel, suffered an emotional breakdown after his sister's suicide. He left his position as youth minister at a fundamentalist church, took to drink, and alienated his family. He now leads a solitary life in Southern California, where he surfs during the day and works nights as a security guard at an industrial complex. Prone to tirades against religion, he also quotes the poet Philip Larkin. When Cindy Liu, an apparently vulnerable and desperate young woman he meets by chance, disappears around the same time a fellow guard is murdered, Haines intuits that a mob of drug and pornography dealers, run by evil, hypocritical Christians, must be to blame. Roused into impulsive, clumsy action, he sets out to find Cindy and his colleague's killer. Persons of faith will likely feel uncomfortable in Haines's company. Others, including those who admire Coleman's poetry collection, Fire Season, will sympathize as his protagonist struggles to achieve some peace of mind. Most readers will be curious to see what the author does next.
