The Living god by Sam Heaps is a temporal wake of trauma that refuses to relocate. 

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Release date: Oct. 1, 2025 | SARKA Publishing

Told over 24 hours outside Whitehall, Montana, The Living god follows “baby,” the young lover of aging prophetess Elaina, and Jesse, the father of Elaina’s toddler messiah, as they struggle together in exile after a catastrophe in their religious community. When baby miscarries Jesse’s child, their futures are thrown into turmoil, forcing the couple to face the violent desires that have motivated their lives.

The Living god embodies what literature must do if it is meant to change us—ask us to reframe our relationship to ourselves, the world, and the broken belief systems that no longer serve us.

“A sleek, spirit-haunted story of trauma and belonging. Heaps is excellent at depicting the place where the vividness of doubt and the dark erotics of desire converge. The Living god is a painful and razor-sharp vision of the struggle to pick your way through the lone and dreary world after the immolation of all you held dear.”

—Brian Evenson, author of Father of Lies and Song for the Unraveling of the World

“The Living god is a story of obsession, a precise confession that leaves nothing important to the imagination. Heaps is a deliberate, smart writer with the eye of a poet who manages to deliver a story so gentle and brutal it entirely disarms you. Readers, like the narrator, immerse in love as a cult, delirious and messy until the last page. Anything longer would be too indulgent, too satisfying, for a story about love like this.”

—Marissa Higgins, author of A Good Happy Girl and Sweetener

“The Living god has the quality of a voice from the grave, or a story told through a spirit board. It features a small set of characters—the leader, the seeker, and the lost—whose lives interlock, forming a specifically American picture of spiritual richness and destitution. In crisp, often sumptuous prose, Sam Heaps moves us through 24 hours in the life of ‘baby,’ a lost soul navigating several intense relationships from the margins. The Living god establishes Heaps as a serious writer, and SARKA as a press to watch for releases in the future.”

—Ben Fama, author of If I Close My Eyes and judge of SARKA’s 2025 Novel Prize

“The mystical significance of The Living god rests in its quotidian accounts. Such raw honey. So sensual and medicinal. The mellified moments.”

— Marc Anthony Richardson, American Book Award winner and Creative Capital fellow

“The Living god is a beautifully brutal story about loss—of faith, love, and family—but it’s also a novel about the very nature of storytelling, and the ways language itself fails us. Sam Heaps is a stunning, tremendous talent, and this book is propulsive, gut-wrenching, tender, and wise.”

—Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe