Mercy takes the reader down backroads and through dimly lit streetlights. Set in the backdrop of the gritty South, these sharp, bruised stories pop with quiet thunder of lives held together by broken liturgies and thinning hope.

This collection gives flickers of hope through Luikart's mournful clarity. A hymn for the half-broken, mercy is not always clean. Sometimes it limps. Sometimes it bleeds. Sometimes it drips into the bloody hands of the observer.