Book excerpt: Appalachia is full of ghosts. I ought to know; I am one of them. My story was already written before I ever drew breath one cold Kentucky morning in the Emerita Coal Mining Camp on the eve of the Great Depression. How come I was in my grave by my 10th birthday takes some telling. The hills and hollers of Appalachia can swallow a man, let alone a girl like Bud Grace. Born the daughter of coal miner and funeralizing preacher Mournful Grace, her life is her father's story. The Bloody Harlan County Coal Wars are just getting cranked up. Appalachia's natural world is under assault by industrialists who are after its minerals at any cost. Mournful, the seventh son of a seventh son cursed with second sight, can see trouble coming and struggles to change the future, all the while knowing he has no power over it. Everything that's coming is already in the past. In a desperate battle to save his beloved Evangeline and their daughter Bud, he must wage his own war against enemies bent on his personal destruction. Bud lays bare the mysterious beauty and intricate customs of a forgotten land, as she unravels Mournful's tragic tale-one of haunting poverty and unimaginable violence as two worlds collide.