Rory Singleton’s life is built on secrets—from his childhood playing a Crusader in the vanishing woods of Memphis, through his passionate, hidden bond with his friend Drew, to his eventual life as a prominent megachurch pastor. When his carefully constructed world begins to collapse, Rory embarks on a reckoning that takes him from the pulpit to underground queer spaces, from respectability to radical honesty. The Angels Came to Sodom in the Evening is an audacious exploration of desire, faith, and the price of living authentically in a world that demands conformity. With echoes of James Baldwin and Flannery O’Connor, Paul Russell crafts a devastating portrait of American masculinity, religious hypocrisy, racial and sexual bigotry—as well as the liberating power of confronting one’s deepest self, no matter the cost.
The Angels Came to Sodom in the Evening
Praise for Paul Russell’s novels:
“Intimate and epic, gorgeously written, divinely detailed, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov is an ingenious hybrid of a book, powerful, troubling, exciting.” — Sigrid Nunez
“The Coming Storm takes off from a sensational subject to arrive at unexpected heights and subtleties. It’s both unsettling and touching… well-nigh flawless.”—The Washington Post Book World
“Boys of Life is simply great writing — risky, honest, horrifying and insightful…. A forthright vision of love’s darkest possibilities.” — Dorothy Allison
“If Tennessee Williams were young today and a Yankee, The Salt Point is the novel he might have written. It finds the sacred and poetic even in the slag heap of small-town America.” — Edmund White
