The story begins in the early 1960s in an isolated mountainous area near the Ohio River, where coal and steel are the major industries. The exact location is never given, for the story takes place in an area cut off from the outside world, where the characters identify not with their state or county, but with the mountain on which they live. M.C.

Higgins's world consists of Sarah's Mountain and the surrounding countryside. It is a landscape both beautiful and wild, tangled and untouched in the bottomlands, but flat and scarred on the top, where strip-miners have worked. A giant spoil heap, made up of broken tree limbs, dirt, and mining refuse, has been left by the strip-miners above M.C.'s house, and the heap is slowly sliding, threatening to one day bury the house and anyone inside it.

Nearby is Kill's Mound, a mysterious, forbidding...