Seventeen-year-old Jacob is well aware of the commandment "Honor thy father and mother." But his mother has been dead for a year, and in order to protect his sister and himself, Jacob plans to kill his father. In Wharton, Texas, a rural and dilapidated town where cotton once made kings out of paupers, Jacob's mental health is rapidly deteriorating. He has to cope with the death of his mother, the responsibility of raising a younger sibling, and a deranged father who breeds ferocious fighting pit bulls and deals drug, all from the once-functioning and prosperous family farm. Jacob struggles to preserve his sister's naive worldview while searching for meaning and hope in the dismal circumstances that surround him. When intense supernatural visions begin to cripple Jacob's ability to live productively, desperation consumes him. Killing his father seems to be the only salvation from his rapidly crumbling world. A literary sketch of a failed moral calculus and madness at its inception, " So Shall We Pass " explores the ways in which an adolescent such as Jacob responds to the often overwhelming energies of life."