The Mercy Boys are four Dundee men who meet every day at their local pub and drink themselves into temporary oblivion. Junior is a fastidious depressive who has been pretending for years that his bedridden wife is already dead. His friend Sconnie traverses the country on random trains, in search of the last good night, while Alan lives in a kind of a dream, haunted by a neighbour's child who thinks she is a voodoo priestess, and pursued by a sadistic madman, who believes the secret message of the gospels is that everything female must be destroyed. Their fantasy world falls apart when Sconnie drifts into a bizarre trap, and Rob, the last of the four, commits an act of brutal and senseless violence. In his second novel, John Burnside explores the 'by-way to Hell' that Bunyan describes in Pilgrim's Progress, a road that descends relentlessly into murder, madness and ritual sacrifice. This is a hell inhabited by men, the hell that Dostoevsky calls 'the inability to love'. It is only at the end, when everything is lost, that Alan is permitted a fleeting and provisional taste of redemption, in a grotesque moment of absurd and impossible love.