The Man Who Played God

Franklin Black "sat in the carriage observing the burnt out remains of the church; and ...since its destruction, no effort had been made to rebuild or even to tear it down-perhaps to keep it as a reminder of what had happened." Later he announced his intention to make a journey to a forbidden place called the Valley of Death, which had claimed the lives of many, who had ventured there, in order to find the Grover's pastor, Jacob Parker, who was also considered the cause of the church fire; he disappeared shortly after the blaze, in which many local people were killed. In his search, he discovered a very strange, to put in very mildly-a world turned upside down into one of madness and brutality. To paraphrase the words of Joseph Conrad, it is one that has negated the familiar and embraced the strange. Black is captured and detained by an autocrat, who simply goes by the name of "the old man of the Valley." Black discovers that the old man has created an idolatrous religion that the Valley's natives have been forced to embrace; its practices include decapitation of intruders and eating their flesh-which is described in bloody detail.