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Lamb Bright Saviors (Flyover Fiction)

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Mr. Gene and his assistant young Mady travel across Nebraska preaching the Lord's word and distributing bibles. However, Mr. Gene takes ill and knows he is dying. He stops at the home of an elderly blind woman while word spreads of the preacher's imminent demise which leads to many folks arriving.

As he babbles about God, four people are invited to hear his final confession. Each is euphoric with the chance because they seek redemption. Living inside a baseball dugout, Oly prays that one day he will coach school sports. Former convict Yarborough sought revenge against someone who betrayed him, but forgave the person after he took a pound of flesh. Tattooed all over his body, Gus uses body art to display his ire at the world. Finally Iraqi war veteran Munoz carries the head of his brother in arms killed in theater.

This profound character study is a terrific look into the souls of six people seeking redemption; ironically that includes the rambling preacher who believes if he delivers the four strangers to God he will have atoned for his sins. The novella contains a stark Nebraska atmosphere that enhances the story line for those readers who will appreciate an austere reflection on the foibles of atoning for one's life even in death.

Harriet Klausner

Robert Vivian believes in holy dread, the transporting awe of, as he puts it after Jorge Luis Borges, "the peculiar and never-ending mystery of our place here on earth." The mystery of a prophet who can only make his message heard on his deathbed, perhaps, or of a soldier whose sacrifice haunts his comrades far beyond his grave. Death and the promise of redemption, no less, are the subject of Lamb Bright Saviors, Vivian's second novel.
Outside of a small town in Western Nebraska, seven people come together in an isolated farm house: the dying preacher, his teenage assistant, the four local men who carried him in, and the owner of the house, a blind widow. As the unnamed itinerant prophet delivers his last sermon, his vision finds resonance with his unlikely witnesses and mysteriously unveils each onlooker's essence.
Vivian's writing aims to feed the hunger for release and meaning that one of his characters laments: "There's so much you can't share with another person, I'm surprised you can share anything at all."
More about this book and Robert Vivian in Nebraska Life