Fiction at its best has an incredible power over us. It may make us see the world differently. It may cause us to enter into worlds that we have never dreamed of entering. It may make us laugh or cry, boost us or bruise us.

On rare occasions, if we are lucky and if the timing is absolutely right, a story may enter into our hearts and begin the process of making a part of us over again.

David Adams Richards’s Mercy Among The Children was for me just such a rare story. I read this book two weeks ago and keep going back to it, rereading certain passages, wondering how the author came to put together such a wondrous and tragic story as this one, and realizing, too, that this story had somehow fundamentally changed my view of the world around me.

Mercy Among The Children tells the painful story of the Henderson family — Sidney, the gentle, self-educated, and tormented father; Elly, the mother, who follows her husband in his travail with a will and a holy love equal to his own; Lyle, the angry first son; Autumn, his sister; and Percy, his little brother, who is surely destined to become one of literature’s great saints.

In the early 1960s, the 12-year-old Sidney pushes a boy, Connie Devlin, from a church roof. Looking down on Devlin’s body, Sidney makes a vow “that he would never raise his hand or voice to another soul, that he would attend church every day.” Just then the Devlin boy, who will later become one of Sidney’s several enemies, jumps up, laughs, and runs away.

From that day on, Sidney tries to honor his pledge, and his life becomes filled with battles, not only against the harsh climate and bitter poverty of rural northeastern New Brunswick, a place of logging, pulp cutting, and sawmills, but also against the hard people who live around him. Through the help of a friend, Sidney learns to read and finds solace and hope in books and in his faith. Reading these classic books helps him form an outlook on life that is different from that of his neighbors, different indeed from much of the human race. It is Sidney’s lived beliefs — to battle evil by doing good, to try to find truth — that bring him both rewards and torments.

Matthew Pit, his sister Cynthia, the wealthy Leo McVicer, the conniving Connie Devlin, and the weak Rudy Bellinger form the nucleus of torment for Sidney and the rest of the Hendersons. Each of these people hates or fears Sidney for different reasons, and each of them finds that what they have done to harm Sidney comes back to harm them.

To describe this novel in such a way, however, would be like describing Shakespeare as a well-known actor and poet of the 16th century. In Mercy Among The Children, Richards has created a masterpiece (and I don’t use that word lightly). Through Lyle, who is the narrator and who, like Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe, tells his story in one sitting to a fascinated listener, we grasp the immense struggle of Sidney with poverty and with hateful neighbors. Through Lyle, who has spent several years of his life putting together the events that caused so much harm to his family, we see into the hearts of all these characters, understand what makes them behave, and realize how great an artist has put together such a remarkable work.

Although Mercy Among The Children is a book from which it is difficult to quote — one is tempted to begin and then quote the whole thing — here is just a taste of Richards’s haunting tale. In this low-key scene, Sidney has left his family seeking work. Lyle and Percy, who is about 4 at the time, are talking in the woods near their house.

“I have a deep feeling in my heart that you are going away,” he whispered.

I started pulling the wagon again. “Oh, Percy, that’s not true — Daddy has gone away to work — but that’s not so bad, he will come home again. You shouldn’t worry about these things.”

The wagon stopped with a sudden jerk and one of the back wheels began to wobble, so I bent down and hammered it back into place with a rock.

“I think I will go away some day, too,” Percy sighed. “But don’t tell Mom. It’ll make her sad.”

He rubbed his eyes, because the sunlight was in them. The afternoon shadows lengthened, and at a dusty warm place on the lane between two large pines, sunlight filtered down, and there in that patch of sun stood Autumn with her plastic book bag, waiting for us.

“Hello,” Percy called.

“Big Percy,” Autumn shouted, and waved, and she walked out of the filtering light and became a visible part of us. That day was the first time I realized that she was or would be beautiful. I had never known that she could be. She walked with us to the house.

Having read back over this review, I see that I have failed this book. My review doesn’t say what I wanted to say about its power. My review doesn’t get the book on paper the way I wanted to get it on paper. But don’t let my failure put you off. Find Mercy Among The Children and read it.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville and can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)