David is a refugee from the late sixties and early seventies, now teaching at a community college in Western Massachusetts. Committed to helping his working-class students, he is also a part-time father who is trying to raise his son in a responsible and loving way. When he meets an old lover from the seventies who runs a center for battered women in Boston, and she asks him to help out in an emergency, David finds that his life and his son's begin to spiral into an increasingly dangerous and terrifying sequence of events. David is finally forced to confront his own violence and to examine his life from a different perspective.
"Rejecting the implication of precursors like Deliverance that murderousness is the one primitive bond between men, Clayton reasserts the faith that violence is in fact unconscionable, a wreck of worth, work and love."
