There Will Be Stars by Billy Coffey

 

Well. If you crossed Groundhog Day with Jacob's Ladder in Pigknuckle, Virginia, where the mountains slump under their burden of time, and tried to make it a story about faith and redemption but didn't really have the chops to carry that off, and if you had a cop-out ending almost as bad as What Dreams May Come, you'd write this book. The story is coherent, and Coffey clearly knows the people of his small-town Virginia (may the gawds have mercy on his soul) but the novel has no redeeming graces past that.