"The town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days. Once a peaceable town, it has devolved into a landscape of fear and ghosts--of regret and violence--transformed by the kudzu vines that have enveloped the hills around it, swallowing entire homes, cars, and rivers. Myer, the county's sardonic lawman, still thinks it can prove itself. When confronted by a strange family of drifters, he believes that the people of Red Bluff can be accepting, rational, even good. His faith is tested--first when townsfolk respond to the disappearance of two young boys, and then by the appearance of Colburn, a damaged artist who has recently returned to Red Bluff after fleeing as a teenager. Colburn, having fallen in love with the fiery local bar owner, does his best to make amends with his past, only to suffer a greater rupture when his beloved also disappears into the kudzu. His quest to find Celia as well as the boys brings him in direct conflict with the law, and with the dark heart that beats beneath the undergrowth of the forest. Blackwood is the haunting story of a people crippled by the weight of generations--at once nourished and entrapped by the vegabond heart of the Deep South."--Jacket flap.