Polar

T. R. Pearson's Polar offers up, at heart, the bittersweet story of Deputy Ray Tatum's search for a missing child in the wilds of the Virginia Blue Ridge. Filtered through the eyes of a nameless, prying neighbor, this history of love and loss, of crime and punishment in a small, upland town is touched throughout by Pearson's trademark blend of extraordinary high humor and nagging melancholy.
We meet the local citizens - Ray's colleagues in the sheriff's office, his hot-head of a girlfriend, his ill-tempered, vaporish mongrel, and, most significantly, a grubby and miraculous prophet of the truly inconsequential named Clayton. As Ray unravels the mystery of Clayton's condition and thereby closes in on his quarry, Pearson treats us to a lively perspective on rural American life (a marriage of diluted Old Testament values and cable-news-network misinformation) that is both wickedly corrosive and cracklingly funny.