Do, Lord, Remember Me — George Garrett

The events in Do, Lord, Remember Me take place in a matter of hours, and during that time the whole of life is split open before us, exposing the sacred and every shade of the profane. At the center of the novel is Big Red Smalley, a traveling evangelist and faith healer with a criminal past. He arrives in the small southern town of High Pines one day for a tent revival that night, accompanied by his entourage: Cartwright, who looks like a worm and is driven by his desire for money and sex; Moses, a veteran haunted by his wartime deeds and the most obviously moral member of the group: and Miami, a recovering prostitute who loves Red despite his transgressions. When Judith, a young nymphomaniac whom Red healed several years earlier, emerges on the scene seeking a lasting cure, an explosive series of incidents revealing the private hells of public saints ensues.
George Carrett's powerful tragicomic novel, first published in 1965, is a modern Christian parable of man's foolery in a redeemed fallen world. Red - part fraud, part miracle worker, devouring and devoured - will be remembered.