You sit down at the weathered harvest table to write a letter to your son. You need to explain the horrific events of the night, the circumstances that stained your hands with so much blood — the horrors that led you to take the lives of your own father and grandfather.

You journey back through darkness, deliberately, tentatively, to recover your own childhood. You compose your captivity, your torture, and the brutality of the men you’ve just killed. This was life on the farm: the strange and unspeakable things that went on.

And still, hope burned.

By the very same light you also write about escape, about security, compassion, and even love. The simple kindnesses that made you the man you are today, shielding you from danger, teaching you to live….

Until everything changed — everything but the farm.

At once as bleak and moving, tense and beautiful as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Brent LaPorte’s Hope Burned emerges from the ashes of the simplest, nearest apocalypse, from the innocence of childhood utterly betrayed, to ask which is the more difficult: to choose to live, or to die?