Coming Soon
Rheatown, Tennessee. September 1984.
A boy dies. Hours later, he sits up.
Small Town. Impossible Return.
The Story
Rheatown, Tennessee. September 1985.
Myra Cooke and her fourteen-year-old son Dennis never make it home from school. A truck, a stop sign, a moment's inattention at the intersection of 11E and Rheatown Road, and both of them are gone before the ambulance ever arrives.
Hours later, in the county morgue, Dennis Cooke sits up.
No injuries. No explanation. A boy the coroner had already pronounced, breathing again, whole again, looking at the world with a stillness that no one who loves him can quite name, but that all of them, eventually, will feel.
His father Patrick, who buried his own dreams the day his father's stroke handed him a grocery store instead of a life he'd chosen, gets his son back and loses him all over again, one quiet, unplaceable wrongness at a time. Something is different. Something heals too fast, feels too little, watches too closely. And somewhere beneath the ordinary rhythms of a small East Tennessee town, a grieving father is about to make a choice that will cost him far more than the man he blames for his wife's death.
A girl named Samantha Greene falls for the boy sitting two rows over in class, never guessing what she's actually falling for.
And Dennis Cooke, who was never really Dennis Cooke at all, has one year to decide what home means, before the choice is made for him.
The People
Patrick sees a son who is alive but not quite the boy he lost. Samantha sees someone newly confident, brilliant, and impossible to ignore. Greg Baumfield sees the accident as the worst mistake of his life.
Meet the people of Rheatown →
The Town
The Cooke home on the hill, the family grocery, Greene County High School, and a basement hidden behind black plastic all become part of what Rheatown remembers.
Explore the locations →1938
The old grocery store has another history. One tied to a visitor no one in town ever knew had arrived.
