Heathen Valley: A Novel

The Story

Overlooked and unavailable for more than forty years, Heathen Valley is an extraordinary novel, a book that surges with power, character, and insight. Romulus Linney’s haunting and original work was born from the church histories of the Valle Crucis mission in western North Carolina. Told in four parts, it is a story set in an almost unknown valley, “Heathen, a Valley That Forgot God.” With a quiet, muscular violence and biblical cadence that readers of Cormac McCarthy will recognize, Linney takes us into the 1850s, where an idealistic bishop from New England and a life-whipped, sorrowful transient named Starns struggle to win souls and transform the valley. Widely reviewed when it was first published in 1962 and selected as an alternate for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Romulus Linney’s first novel, Heathen Valley, was never reprinted and has never before been in paperback.