The Watcher: Like Sweet Bells Jangled

by Thomas Rain Crowe

This 19th century Romeo & Juliet story is set in a Shaker community in Kentucky in the mid-1800s during the antebellum Protestant Revival—up to and including the Civil War years--which is a very lively, exotically colorful and eccentric period of Shaker history known as the Era of Manifestation (referring to the manifestation of spirits). While this is not a “Shaker novel” (or genre “Christian fiction”) or a standard “Romance novel,” it is, rather, “Historical fiction” and uses the Kentucky Shaker community (based on the Shaker community of Pleasant Hill) as a backdrop to create the book’s major conflict—which is that between the Shakers and their neighbors in the town of Herodsville. Asher, a young poet and the son of an evangelical Baptist preacher from Herodsville, falls in love with Kitt, a rare beauty and revered member of the celibate Shaker community of Pleasant Grove. When this covert love affair is discovered by Shaker elder Wilford Ranks, (“The Watcher”), it changes not only his life, but profoundly affects the lives and romance of the two young people he “watches” from his window in the wall of the Meeting House. The “window in the wall” is the ongoing metaphor for the events and conflicts which follow, which begin with The Watcher (Ranks) as a “Big Brother” figure through whose eyes we witness the spectacle(s) of Shaker life and its inevitable demise.

238 pages, Paperback

First published April 17, 2015

About the author

Thomas Raine Crowe is an American poet and translator. He is Associate Editor of Asheville Poetry Review and the New Native Press in North Carolina.