Renewal

ISBN-9781511460576

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RENEWAL centers on Lee Dillon Ford, a 32 year-old barely-functional alcoholic daylaborer and gutter punk in Portland, Oregon, whose debaucherous lifestyle of cheap liquor, cheaper women, and little responsibility is interrupted by the death of his estranged younger half-brother, Barrett. The police are calling it suicide, but a voicemail left on Lee's phone minutes before the boy's death would seem to suggest otherwise.

 

Driven by a compulsion to be in death the sibling he never was in life, Lee traces Barrett's movements and finds he had joined a farming collective of hippies, slackers, runaways, addicts, and criminals led by the mysterious Edlund Boggs, an ex-soldier now calling himself a prophet of Mother, the spirit of the Earth. Edlund believes Renewal is coming, a global event that will end civilization and thrust the world into a more agrarian era, for which most the population is unprepared. But not Edlund and his people, his Select. They grow their own food, eschew modern conveniences, and live off the grid, fortifying their isolated property behind a massive wall. Lee, going by his middle name, infiltrates this group to learn if anyone here was responsible for what happened to Barrett. In the meantime, however, the farm, its people and philosophies awaken in Lee a person he hadn't known was there. A better person. Leading this effort is Clair, the woman who brought Barrett to this place, and who begins as a target of Lee's, but quickly becomes something more meaningful, further blurring the line between Lee's responsibility to his dead half-brother, and his responsibility to himself.

 

The deeper he gets, the greater he commits himself inextricably to Edlund and the Select, becoming one of them in body, and slowly in spirit. But as evidence of Barrett reveals itself and the story of his last days starts to come together, Lee must decide which family he is a part of, which version of himself to be, and what to do about the increasingly unstable community into which he's embedded himself.