In the shadowed hollows of Appalachia, two families exist on opposite sides of an invisible line. Hem, a disgraced veterinarian, struggles to keep his family intact after his daughter elopes with a local miner and his young son suffers a devastating injury. Up the mountain, Spoon Sullivan rules the region's criminal underworld with calculated brutality, while his wife Em retreats into addiction and their son Mason begins to question everything he's been taught.

When Hem's son rescues a wounded dog from the Sullivan compound, the fragile boundaries between these families collapse. What follows is a collision of lives marked by desperation, violence, and the human need for freedom at any cost.

As floodwaters rise and tensions build, each character faces impossible choices between loyalty and survival. Parents fail their children. Children betray their parents. And throughout it all, the animals they keep become mirrors for their own caged existence.

In sparse, luminous prose, Ryan Burden traces how the pursuit of freedom can lead to even deeper confinement, and how sometimes the only escape comes through destruction. Where the Light Flickers is a searing portrait of rural lives caught in the machinery of circumstance—a novel that examines what happens when the light of hope appears just long enough to reveal the darkness.