After Thaddeus Jacobs, the adopted son of a traveling preacher, is found naked with a young woman, he is expelled from the only family he has ever known.  Guided by visions and a mysterious voice, he makes his way to a coastal South Carolina island where he struggles to make his peace with God and himself, in spite of his own strange cravings and the superstitious hatred of the islanders, who think he is the devil.  The price of his inner peace is absolute isolation, but when he meets Kilby, a thirteen-year-old boy, he rediscovers what it means to be human.

Part myth, part fable, part satire, and part coming-of-age story, The Conjure Man plumbs the emotional depths of the human psyche in prose both dreamlike in the images it conjures and intensely vivid in the psychology it reveals.  Told from the alternating viewpoints of Kilby and Thaddeus, it depicts a world where magic does exist, and miracles are possible.

Peter Damian Bellis is also the author of One Last Dance with Lawrence Welk & Other Stories (1996, River Boat Books), which was named a 1997 Minnesota Book Award Finalist!

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