It’s been stewing for decades.

“I’ve kind of been thinking about this for sometime. I’ve been taking notes forever but these last few years, it just made sense,” author Mitch Luckett told The Leader of his third novel.

The tome, he admits, is semi-autobiographical, based on his experiences growing up in the Ozark Mountains of northeast Missouri.

From the time he was 4, when his mother married an evangelist preacher, “up until the year I turned 12, it was very intense. He was a born-again preacher, and any outside activity we’d want to do, for instance play baseball after school, we’d have to spend that same amount of time in church."

And for his Pentecostal step-father, religion centered on such unusual practices such as snake dances which believers ascribe to biblical origins.

“Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you (Luke 10:19).”

The Pentecostals preached that a person could prove their righteousness by handling something believed to be evil and poisonous snakes are plentiful in the Ozarks.

“To see someone up there, handling a snake, it looks pretty powerful, and every now and then someone gets bit and then of course, sometimes someone dies,” Luckett noted.

One of his characters, Uncle Harm, sets out to prove his own righteousness in his own way.

“He stuck his feet out the bedroom window in the winter to test God’s love. Well God didn’t love him because he got his feet amputated and he eventually died from it.”

That part of the story is based on fact but it became the basis of a mystery to be solved by his main characters, 13-year-old Mo Grady and his twin sister, whose physical growth abated at the age of 6, in the parlance of the times, a midget.

“Their mom is accused of killing him because she had witchy ways, and so she’s arrested, and the 13-year-old kids have to figure out how to get mama out of jail and how to solve the mystery of who killed Uncle Harm,” Luckett explained.

“The mystery is a fun aspect of the story. When I was about that age, we moved into town from the farm and I became a Southern Baptist, which is very different from my step-father’s beliefs,” Luckett said, adding that he hasn’t practiced religion for years.

“I got scoured out of it - never practiced religion since then, other than writing this book,” he joked.

Luckett explained that, as a teenager, he worked on farms in return for room and board, and the experience proved fruitful.

“I wanted this book to show that, even in hard times, there’s a certain resiliency to youth. That even in backwoods areas they work out their lives to resolution. I wanted to show that hard times sometimes raises good kids - to give a flavor for what life was like in the Ozarks in the 1950s. And also show the evangelistic religions and how they are sort-of cultist.”

Luckett said he learned to read from what was then the family’s only book, “Mundum Rules of Parliamentary Procedure.” Eventually his mother purchased a subscription to Readers Digest and he was hooked.

“Even at 15 years old I was convinced that I was going to be a writer. My first solo flight was a 60-mile drive to Hannibal on my 16th birthday in an old 61 Chevy. I just hung out at Mark Twain Square. He was one of my first heroes. Living next to the Mississippi you know. Someone once said to him, ‘You write just like you talk!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you know it took me a long time to learn how to do that.’ That’s one thing I learned from him. I write like me.”

As a young man Luckett grew weary of the snow and the cold so he moved to the Northwest for its more temperate clime.

“The first winter I was out here I grew a metaphorical webbing between my toes. It’s my country now, you know?”

Luckett lives in Brinnon near the Mason County line. His new book, “Holy Roller Heart” (Bennett & Hastings Publishing) is a Southern grit, coming-of-age story set in Missouri in the 1950s.