Sitting up with Mr. Bellwether

The first thing Earl Pritchard learned about sitting up with the dead was that nobody ever called it a funeral. A funeral had flowers, a preacher, and coffee cake. Sitting up with the dead was what happened after the respectable people went home-when someone had to watch the body through the night. On the last Friday night of October 1957, Earl Pritchard takes the job for twenty dollars, despite a mountain of bad feelings.
Arriving at the leaning, eerie Bellwether estate deep in the Alabama woods, he finds the late Orville Bellwether resting in a dark-oak coffin. But this isn't an ordinary wake: the coffin is wrapped in heavy hemp rope, sitting on wheels on a crooked floor, and guarded by the dead man's unbothered widow, Martha, and Earl's sleep-prone cousin, Leon. When knocking sounds, snapping ropes, and a rolling coffin spiral into complete madness, Earl finds himself in a desperate battle against physics, local superstition, and a body that simply refuses to stay put.
Sitting Up with Mr. Bellwether is a hilarious, atmospheric dark comedy that proves some night shifts are never worth the money.