The name tag is blank on purpose.
Before dawn, Shiloh Malachi writes a small word on it—JANITOR, GROUNDSKEEPER, SUBSTITUTE—and walks into the room where someone is still awake. A nurse fighting a custody hearing after a double shift. A soldier who has not unpacked the duffel in eleven months. A teenage hacker about to flood a neighborhood to avenge his sister’s lungs. A widow angry at the grass. A doctor who signed a footnote that became a funeral.
He does not preach. He listens. He plays a guitar because it pleases His Father. Then he leaves the next step in the only hands that can take it.
It’s a cycle of 33 stories that moves from hospital closet to cemetery oak, from computer lab to loading dock, from a child’s ward to the office of a president who deletes the lullaby. The question in the title is never answered with a vision. It is answered the way the book itself works: one true thing, done without an audience.
For judges: this is faith fiction that refuses spectacle. The theology is in the mop water. The plot is the cost of the next honest act.
Who is Shiloh Malachi? is a linked-story novel that treats the Christ encounter as work, not theater. Each chapter is a complete life under pressure—custody, combat guilt, grief, addiction, institutional cowardice—and the visitor never takes the decision away from the person who has to live with it. The prose is spare and physical: dirt under a nail, a receipt on a bus window, a name tag written in small letters. The book earns its ending in the newsroom, where four unrelated witnesses refuse to let a reporter shrink the man into “a kind stranger,” and the reporter cannot produce the fraud she came for. It is built for readers who are tired of being shouted at and still hungry for a presence that stays long enough to tell the truth, then walks toward the next door.
