Description

A dark Southern tale of desperate souls who’ve wound up on the road of poor choices, a messianic child with untold powers, and those out hunting her for their own reward, all drawn together by Michael Farris Smith’s trademark mournful, spirit-gnawing prose.

An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night. A light in the wood draws her to a campfire with two strange, dangerous men, who are there plotting a crime of as-yet-indeterminate purpose. The two men have a job to do. They are hunting something precious but have only been told: you’ll know it when you see it.

When they arrive at the place, an abandoned church cellar in the burned-out countryside, they find an answer they never could have predicted.

Now, the job feels dubious, one that’ll surely bring them to ruin. Yet if they’re to go against orders, no step can be undone, and nothing can be taken back.

In spare prose, Lay Your Armour Down reduces the epic to its most elemental. It charts the course of several broken people, all outrunning danger’s dark fingers, and all brought together for one last chance at redemption.

Publisher Review

‘An exceptional storyteller in top form… Smith is building his own Faulkner-esque universe’ Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review ‘Every once in a while an author comes along who’s in love with art and the written language and image and literary experiment and the complexity of his characters and the great mysteries that lie just on the other side of the physical world, writers like William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx. You can add Michael Farris Smith’s name to the list.’- James Lee Burke, Creole Belle and The Tin Roof Blowdown