Obedience (Paperback) | Released: 02 Jun 2016

About the Book

It is a lazy summer day in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee; much like the day before, and the day before that. Everything seems normal - at least on the surface; like an idyllic, pastoral painting; the sky dyed with pastels of blue and white, the ground carpeted with dark green fescue and bluegrass, a clapboard farmhouse resting on top of a hill, sugar maples, oaks and Eastern red cedars providing welcome shade from the heat of a Tennessee summer sun. You can almost see moving images of little children running barefoot through the grass; an era before tweeting and texting and the triumph of technology over all.

Alas, appearances lie.

Behind the clapboard farmhouse sits a red barn, all bright and new looking; fresh enough to lull a casual observer into believing it the benign keeper of hey for cattle and shelter for goats. A closer look reveals the color to be not barn red, but blood red.

Locals tend to close their eyes when passing by that barn. Something is just not right about it. Some say it is unnatural. Some say it's obscene and evil. But they don't say such things out loud, for the owner of the barn is Sheldon Sprigg, a well-respected man of the cloth, the preacher at Hare's Corner Church of God Incarnate. Sheldon is the most upright man in these parts. He keeps the law religiously, and makes sure his wife and teenaged daughter do too. After all, to obey is better than sacrifice.

Still, there's just something that not right about that barn.
About the Author: Michael Potts grew up near Smyrna, Tennessee and is currently Professor of Philosophy at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina. His undergraduate degree (in Biblical languages) is from David Lipscomb University. He also holds the Master of Theology from Harding University Graduate School of Religion, the Master of Arts (in Religion) from Vanderbilt University, and the Ph.D. in philosophy from The University of Georgia.

Michael has fifteen articles in scholarly journals, nine book chapters, six encyclopedia articles, two book reviews, and he has co-edited a book, Beyond Brain Death: The Case Against Brain Based Criteria for Human Death, which was published in 2000 by Kluwer Academic Publishers. He also has over thirty scholarly presentations, including one presented at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at The Vatican in 2005. He is also a 2007 graduate of The Writers Loft at MTSU and a 2007 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.

His poetry has been published in Journal of the American Medical Association, Iodine Poetry Journal, Poems & Plays, and other literary journals. His poetry chapbook, From Field to Thicket, won the 2006 Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Award of the North Carolina Writers Network. His creative nonfiction essay, Haunted, won the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Award, also sponsored by the North Carolina Writers Network. Michael's debut novel, End of Summer, released in the Fall of 2011 from WordCrafts Press.

Besides reading and writing, he enjoys vegetable gardening, canning, and ghost investigations (just for fun!). He and his wife, Karen, live with their three cats, Frodo, Rosie, and Pippin, in Linden, North Carolina.

You can learn more about Michael by reading his blogs at gratiaetnatura.wordpress.com and michaelpotts.livejournal.com