Shadows Follow Us

Bob Leone's real skill in this opening stretch is banter — the kind that carries a marriage, a family, and a friendship without ever feeling like exposition dumped in quotation marks. Jason and Lisa's truck conversation about the five-dollar Super Bowl bet is the standout: it moves from confession, to a promise broken, to a running joke about baby nicknames ("Darth Drooler?" "No.") without losing the emotional thread underneath the jokes — that Jason is a recovering gambler and pastor terrified of becoming "that man again." The dueling grandmothers scene ("He smiled at me." "He smiles at ceiling fans.") is genuinely funny sitcom-timing dialogue that also does real characterization work, sketching Judith and Victoria in a handful of exchanges.

The book earns its genre stripes, too, once Brother Luv and Masri enter the frame. The tent revival sequence — possessed stagehands rigging a maple podium, a healing that reads as triumphant and wrong at once, Lisa's quiet "There's a kernel of truth there. But only a kernel" — is a nicely constructed slow-burn of dramatic irony, letting the reader see what Jason can't. Masri's demon-boardroom scene, with its casual, bureaucratic cruelty ("I don't require apologies... I require results"), gives the antagonist side a jolt of real menace amid the domestic warmth. This is a book confident in its double register — cozy family comedy shot through with spiritual warfare stakes — and the dialogue is the connective tissue holding both halves together convincingly.