The Sin Eaters

by Andrew Beahrs

An old woman escaping a murderer. A girl gambled away to a clockmaker. A man paid to take the sins of the dead upon himself. All criminals. All fleeing. All together. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1592642365
• ISBN13: 9781592642366
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: Toby Press
• Length: 237 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Atmospheric tale of sin, poverty and Puritans

With a special affinity for outcasts and a nuanced understanding of the Puritans' approach to sin, Beahrs' second novel captures the struggles of early 17th century English life as intensely as his fine first novel "Strange Saint." The primary narrator, an elderly widow, herbalist, and a woman not easily crossed, Sarah opts not to join her Puritan congregation on their migration to America and stays in her village instead. But the place is soon overrun with vagabonds, swarming into the empty houses and doing the landlords' bidding of enclosing the traditionally common lands. The vagabond leader, Sam Ridley, is particularly rude and bullying. "Now, I've been a vagabond myself, and my Henry a vagabond with me," Sarah explains. "There is no shame in being a vagabond. I understand the longing for a home one feels when on the rolling road. But understanding a man does not mean you must like him....I had already seen that Ridley was willing to force others to wander. I knew that to better his own station he would give grain fields to sheep, forcing the old farmers into vagabondage themselves." When she stands up to Ridley, he forces the scold's bridle on her. But Sarah is not so easily cowed. Her vengeance is dire and dramatic and before the night is out she is a vagabond once more. She has not gone far before she meets a man in worse straits than she. Bill, the second primary narrator - a young, simple-minded innocent - is another victim of Ridley's cruel taste in sport. A poor sin-eater, he was driven from the village with sticks and jeers, and left naked in the woods. Sin eating, we learn, is a product of the English Church. Doing away with Catholicism, the new Church also did away with confession, and the relief of absolution. "Now a father may fear that his son goes to the next life sullied with sin - a daughter may fear for her mother, a husband for his wife." Bill, a starving vagabond, became a sin eater when, touched by another's generosity, he was tricked into eating corpse food (bread and wine that sit on a body overnight, absorbing its sin). Now his body blisters with the pollution of others' sins and he's fit only for eating more sin. But Sarah, recognizing the effects of bad food (which is what's usually fed to sin eaters), cures Bill's rashes and sickness and wins his trust and loyalty. Uniting his brawn and simplicity with her devious and realistic intelligence, they set out for a seaside town where Sarah will reclaim herself and confront the sin that has shadowed her life. Along the way she cleanses Bill of the sins he has absorbed, befriends a woman on the run from an aged, cruel husband, and meets treachery and kindness (more of the former than the latter). Naturally we have not seen the last of Sam Ridley, whose fury is single-minded and all-consuming while his revenge is calculating and patient. Beahrs immerses us in the daily life of farm, vagabond precariousness and even the teeming nether regions of an aristocrat's hou