THIS ROCK

Cain and Abel, meet Muir and Moody Powell, a pair of yin-and-yang brothers from the same patch of mountain folk who populated Morgan’s last work, the Oprah-anointed best-seller Gap Creek. Muir is a young world-beater drunk on his own pious ambition; Moody’s just a drunk, despondent and quick with a knife. The math says these two should collide in some fiery metaphor for our troubled human civilization, but Morgan resists the easy karmic switcheroo. The whole affair sags a little under its own archetypal weight — Morgan never lets you forget you’re reading a parable — but you’ll buy almost anything off his two full-throated narrators (Muir and Ginny, the boys’ mother), whose voices ring with dread and longing.