Crafting for Sinners

The novel opens with a transcript from Cold Cases, Lost Faces, a true-crime podcast investigating the disappearance of Tom Torrence, a gay man who vanished from a small Kentucky town in the early 2000s. A young neighbor, Barbara Atkins, and her infant daughter Elizabeth also disappeared around the same time. The hosts theorize the cases are linked, possibly to Barbara's husband and to a cluster of abandoned buildings in the nearby woods, where a burn pit contained possible human bone fragments.

Ruth, a bisexual woman in her mid-twenties, lives with her girlfriend Abigail in Kill Devil, Kentucky, a town dominated by the New Creationists, a megachurch sect. The couple hides their relationship as anti-LGBTQ violence escalates around them. They save what little they can in an ornate ceramic jar on their mantel that serves as their moving fund, a vessel decorated with vines and foreign characters that Abigail found in the closet of her late mother, Judy. Abigail wants desperately to leave, but Ruth secretly fears that moving will cost her the relationship.

When Ruth runs out of yarn for a commissioned blanket, she must visit New Creations, the church-owned craft store that fired her years earlier after management discovered she was dating a woman. She has since been shoplifting from the store in retaliation. Before leaving, she encounters two New Creationist missionaries on her porch who recite cryptic phrases and arrive without a car.

At the nearly deserted store, Ruth conceals stolen yarn and picks up a pair of unusually sharp carbon-fiber knitting needles. An employee wearing a golden shepherd's crook pin confronts her, claiming they have cataloged her thefts for months. Ruth bolts for the exit but finds the security gate locked. In the struggle, she accidentally stabs the man through the eye with a needle, killing him. A second employee leads her to a back room, but Ruth overhears a voice on his headset say she is "special and precious" and that "it won't work if she's dead." She fights free and begins a desperate battle for survival through the store's aisles.

A pamphlet the missionaries left explains the cult's hierarchy: sinners, including LGBTQ people, are classified as "Lost Sheep," while elite enforcers called "Noble Shepherds," identifiable by golden crook pins, are tasked with capturing them. Ruth improvises weapons from the merchandise, including cleaning spray, mirror shards, and super glue, while discovering that all scissors and blades have been deliberately removed from the shelves. She disables the security cameras by overloading a faulty electrical outlet, plunging the store into darkness, and fills a squirt gun with paint thinner as another weapon.

Using a stolen headset radio, Ruth eavesdrops on the cult's communications. Their leader, Gideon, reveals they must complete a ritual before midnight to seal a demon inside a vessel. An elder named Solomon explains that the ritual involves killing a chosen sinner, consuming their flesh, and using the purified blood to reseal the vessel. Solomon reveals Ruth was selected because she has no one who would investigate her disappearance, and that after her death the cult plans to target Abigail. This revelation transforms Ruth's fear into fury.

She climbs atop the store's shelving and topples a massive unit, which crashes through multiple rows, crushing Solomon and other Shepherds. Badly injured, with a twisted ankle, a fractured wrist, and a bleeding head wound, Ruth reaches the locked back door but cannot bypass it. Her blood sugar plummeting, she passes out and awakens in a tunnel system beneath the store, where her ex-fiancé Charlie has revived her with emergency glucose medication. Charlie reveals he nominated her as the sacrifice, believing he is saving her soul. When Ruth refuses to cooperate, Charlie uses a lighter to ignite the squirt gun she had filled with paint thinner. The flame travels backward, and the gun explodes in his hand, setting him ablaze. Ruth escapes deeper underground.

The tunnel complex spans multiple levels, including a shrine room where display cases hold personal items from past victims. One label reads "Tom Torrence, January 21, 2000," connecting to the podcast's cold case. Ruth also discovers a ceramic jar identical to the one on her mantel, suggesting Judy had a connection to the cult. A painted genealogy on a tunnel wall traces the cult's leadership to 1785. Interspersed documents reveal that Barbara Atkins fled her husband James because of his involvement with the cult, and that an 1823 legal record from near the local creek, Hell for Certain, documents indictments for witchcraft, establishing the group's deep roots in the region.

Ruth emerges into a hidden commune in the woods, where women and children gather around a bonfire and learn that every blood moon the cult must reseal a jar containing a demon with a sacrifice's purified blood. Spotted by a young boy, Ruth flees into the forest. She reaches the road and surrenders to two police officers, only to learn they are cult members stationed to intercept her. They deliver her to the church.

In the ritual room, a stone chamber lined with artifacts and candles, Ruth is tied to an altar. Gideon is revealed to be James, the church's pastor and Abigail's estranged father. Travis, the young recruit who survived the shelf collapse, is initiated by consuming a piece of Ruth's flesh and drinking her blood. Ruth sees Abigail among the cloaked figures, calm and smiling, and believes she has been betrayed. Her will to fight collapses.

A shift to Abigail's perspective reveals the truth. Police officers lure Abigail to the church by claiming Ruth has been arrested. There, a man named James proves he is Abigail's father, explaining that Judy changed their names when she fled decades earlier, and that Abigail's birth name was Elizabeth. Overwhelmed but never forgetting Ruth, Abigail plays along with the cult to stay close.

In the ritual room, Abigail asks to make the first cut as a supposed act of atonement. Gideon, proud of her devotion, hands her the dagger. Instead, Abigail slashes Ruth's ropes and attacks the surrounding cultists. Ruth kicks the table holding the vessel, a small ceramic jar the cult believes contains a demon, and Abigail catches it. When Gideon seizes her wrist, Abigail tells him, "Mom was right to leave you," cuts his hand, and hurls the jar to the floor. It cracks, an unnatural chill fills the room, and the cultists panic. The pair fights free and escapes the church.

An unnaturally rapid fire consumes the building, which collapses into a sinkhole caused by the tunnels beneath it. The pit fills with what resembles liquid fire, and a guttural roar sounds from below. The fault line extends to the commune, and screams rise from the trees. Ruth and Abigail flee through the burning forest and wade into Hell for Certain creek.

News articles report the destruction of the church, store, and commune, along with the discovery of hundreds of smuggled antiquities in the intact caves below. In the epilogue, Ruth and Abigail have moved to a new city, living openly. Ruth wears a gold wedding band, and the ceramic jar now holds flowers. Then a knock sounds at their door. A woman and a young boy stand on the porch, shoving a familiar pamphlet into Ruth's hands and grinning. The cult has followed them.