The Snake Handler

"Well-done fantasy. Happy ending without dripping sentiment. ... Deftly sprung, and nice dialogue and narrative voices."--Locus All the Snake Handlers I Know Are Dead, by Dennis Danvers, is dark, magical realism tale about a lone woman building a cabin in the mountains of Appalachia and the strange man she encounters there. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

David Kimbrough explains the history and practice of serpent-handling believers from the pserspective of a respectful and scholarly participant-ovserver.

Let he who is without sin... COME GET SOME. All his life, Reverend Clyde Hilburn has fought to protect his downtrodden flock in the tiny town of Palestine, West Virginia from the evils of the modern world. To that end, he has held a monopoly on not only their souls, but also their thriving drug addiction. But times have changed, and forces larger than him have moved in to take control of both the church and the flow of narcotics. When he suffers a lethal bite from a rattlesnake someone placed in his mailbox, a dying, venom-addicted Clyde has only hours to undo a lifetime of sin, avenge his own murder and save his godforsaken town from the human monsters he's unleashed.

Burton seeks to present a balanced view of the remote churches of East Tennessee where believers take literally the words of Saint Mark: "and they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them."

Note that there is a companion website for this book and it can be seen at: http://secretsofthesnakecharmer.blogspot.com/ Humans and snakes have an intimate and ancient relationship that often revolves around either love or hate. Snakes can be seen as gods, spiritual messengers, symbols of fertility, and guardians of resources in virtually all cultures. But to those that fear them, snakes are seen as venomous creatures that cannot be trusted. In Secrets of the Snake Charmer, John Murphy, a research associate of the Division of Amphibians and Reptiles in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, provides an in-depth, twenty-first century look at snakes utilizing the published research of other herpetologists as well as his own personal experiences and speculations. Murphy covers a wide range of topics such as the adaptability of snakes, the ways in which evolution has tinkered with snakes during the last 160 million years, and the impact snakes have on the ecological communities they live in. While sharing ideas about the origin of snakes, rattlesnake rattles, and spitting in cobras, Murphy presents an innovative portrayal of snakes that proves they co-evolve with their prey, predators, and parasites in order to fulfill a significant and novel role in the web of life.

Brown and McDonald profiles three familiesQone in Middlesboro, Kentucky, one in Newport, Tennessee, and one in Jolo, West VirginiaQinvolved in religious practices which showcase the handling of snakes.