Because there's no rational response to a terminal cancer diagnosis, Willard Russell's course of action following his wife's death sentence doesn't seem as strange as it should.

In Donald Ray Pollock's novel The Devil All the Time, it's a prayer log in the woods, "the remains of a big red oak that had fallen many years ago. A weathered cross, fitted together out of boards pried from the back of the ramshackle barn behind their farmhouse, leaned a little eastward in the soft ground a few yards below them." Willard goes there every morning and evening "unless he had whiskey running through his veins," Pollock writes, and he often takes his son Arvin.

Lest that sound peaceful and perfectly pious for a man who had little use for the church after what he'd seen in World War II, allow Pollock to set the scene as the condition of Willard's wife deteriorates: "Maggots dripped from the trees and crosses like squirming drops of white fat. The ground along the log stayed muddy with blood."

This is in Part One of The Devil All the Time. Out of desperation, Willard begins offering blood sacrifices at the prayer log - animals he killed or scraped off the roads. "But even he had to admit, they didn't seem to working ... ," Pollock writes. "There was one thing that he hadn't tried yet. He couldn't believe that he hadn't thought of it earlier." And that is when Willard decides to kill his landlord.

It happens in the second paragraph of the first chapter of his first book. Peter Geye's 2010 debut, Safe from the Sea, concerns a father and son, but it quickly establishes another character: Minnesota's North Shore, hanging over Lake Superior on its way to Canada.

The son, Noah, has just arrived in Duluth. Geye sets the scene: "Now he could see the lake, a dark and undulating line that rolled onto the shore. The concussions were met with a hiss as the water sieved back through the pebbled beach. The fog had a crystalline sharpness, and he could feel on his cheeks the drizzle carried by the wind. It all felt so familiar, and he thought, I resemble this place. And then, My father, he was inhabited by it."

Both of those italicized statements could apply to Geye, who will be reading from his work November 29 as part of the River Readings at Augustana series. In a phone interview last week, the Minneapolis-based author discussed the importance of the North Shore and the wilderness above it as a place (to him) and a setting (for his two published novels and the one currently in progress). He said either he or his editor came up with the term "Northern Gothic" to describe his books - a descendant of the Southern Gothic of such writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Cormac McCarthy.

As part of its yearlong "Building Common Ground: Discussions of Community, Civility, & Compassion" program, the Bettendorf Public Library held a water-themed essay, poetry, photography, and songwriting contest. Several winners will perform their entries at the "Quad-City Water Lore" event on Monday, November 5, at 7 p.m. in the Bettendorf Room at the library (2950 Learning Campus Drive). A reception begins at 6:30 p.m.

They will be joined by Bucktown Revue emcee Scott Tunnicliff, Rock Island Lines creator Roald Tweet with Chris Dunn, former Quad Cities poet laureate Dick Stahl, turtle expert Mik Holgersson, riverboat pilot Harry "Duke" Pelton, and Quad-City Times columnist Alma Gaul. Musical entertainment will include the St. Ambrose Bee Sharp men's a cappella ensemble, the Quad-City Ukelele Club, Dwayne Hodges, and Jon Eric.

Thanks to the Bettendorf Public Library for its permission to allow us to publish the winners below.

We received 69 entries in our fiction contest, and prize-winners and a selection of other favorites are published here.

To refresh your memory, we set a limit of 250 words per entry. (For future contests, a bit of advice: Count by hand - at least twice.) We also required each entry to conform to one of five prompts in genre (ghost story, romance, tall tale, noir, or biography), point-of-view character (inanimate object, child, polygamist, criminal, or nun), and conflict/action (betrayal, reunion, shame, obsolescence, or unrequited love). And for the brave and/or foolish, we offered the elective option of writing in the style of Dr. Seuss, Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, William S. Burroughs, or Twitter. Who knew there were so many stories waiting to be told about longing objects, sensual nuns, and Seussian polygamists?