"What personal vendetta motivated a group of men, labelling themselves a Vigilance Society, to enter the Donnelly farmhouse in southwestern Ontario on that night in February 1880 and brutally bludgeon the family to death? According to the author, this is the wrong question to ask.

In This Side of Heaven, a phrase he takes from the verse on the Donnelly family gravestone, Norman Feltes suggests that this legendary event cannot be fully understood through conventional narrative, but only as the historical product of the diverse economic, socio-political, and ideological conditions that underlay Biddulph Township during the late nineteenth century.".

"Using a marxist structuralist methodology, the book draws the reader into a compelling web of economic, social, and geographical structures, showing how human actions, sometimes murderous, arise from forces larger than the individual."--BOOK JACKET.