When twenty-one-year-old Hannah Gardner's father sells the family farm, she is cast onto the streets of Sundown, Georgia, where, having left her fundamentalist church, she grapples with the weight of her family's racist past. Working as a shampoo girl at a rinky-dink salon, Hannah tries to make ends meet cutting hair at the local funeral home. HAIRCUTS FOR THE DEAD is a modern retelling of the Fall of Man in a small-town Peyton Place where Hannah is kicked out of Eden and forced to deal with race issues, her sexual identity, the burdens of her family's past, and challenges to her faith.