Now he has written his most ambitious - and successful - work, an epic historical novel based on the 19th-century cholera epidemics that killed millions of people worldwide.

The Scourges of Heaven begins and ends in the fictional Owl Hollow, near Mount Sterling. In October, 1998, two men are digging a water line and unearth a windowed iron coffin with the inscription, "Little John, 1839-1844."

Some 300 pages later, we have been taken on an odyssey 165 years ago and halfway around the world, from London by sailing ship to New Orleans and upriver by steamboat to Maysville, and by stagecoach to Lexington and finally to Mount Sterling in the present.

By the time we know the identity of the boy in the unmarked grave, we also learn about the plague that drove his grandparents and mother to seek an uncertain refuge in America.

But the business of this novel is much more than tracking down Little John's identity. Like a latter-day Voltaire, Dick takes on a Candide-like adventure through the violence, prejudices, injustices, superstitions, greed and occasional enlightenments and reforms of the mid-19th century.

His central character is Cynthia Anne Ferguson, who flees with her parents in 1833 from flea- and rat-infested London on a ship bound for New Orleans.

She is orphaned in mid-ocean by the cholera pandemic. This precocious, spirited girl becomes an assertive, free-thinking adult, and her teachers are in two distinct camps:

• Religious zealots and their followers who preach that plagues are punishments sent by God on a sinful, repentant world; and
• Enlightened scientists, physicians and some religious people who look for causes elsewhere and maintain that God is love, not hate.

Like Candide, Cynthia finally decides that a farm is a worthy destination.

Dick, a Kentucky native who lives on a Bourbon County farm, weaves a rich tapestry to show us the filthy, brutal conditions under which ordinary folks lived, their raucous humor and heroic deeds. We are introduced to a large company of unforgettable characters. There is the Rev. Daniel C. Goodman, who preaches the divine origin of scourges while practicing adultery with a prostitute. There are good people like the ship's doctor, Laurence M. Hanover, a graduate of Transylvania University's medical department, and Harmony Fischer, the take-charge widow who prepares her husband's body for burial and drops it into the sea. There is the golden hearted prostitute and fabulous pleasure-giver Sylva, who works her special "magic" on the preacher and the ship's captain and becomes a nun in New Orleans.

The rough, dictatorial captain is James Henry Lovingsworth, who feeds and talks to the ship's rats each midnight and longs to return home to Kentucky.

In New Orleans, we meet a buggy driver who is a freed slave: "I may've got myself out of a slave mess into a free mess, but anytime I got the chance, I take the free mess."

In Kentucky, two historical figures are skillfully woven into the narrative - William "King" Solomon, who obsessively buries the dead in cholera-ridden Lexington, and a freed black woman named Aunt Charlotte.

But it is first and foremost Cynthia's story. After her husband and son, Little John, die suddenly in a cholera outbreak, she takes over the farm and becomes legendary for her good works and iconoclastic ways. She is the mother of the future, "five inches of topsoil upon which, with sufficient moisture, a civilization could grow."

In her, Dick has created a strong, independent woman to stand with Kentucky literature's best, from Harriette Simpson Arnow's Gertie Nevels and Elizabeth Madox Robert's Ellen Chesser to Bobbie Ann Mason's Samantha Hughes and Betty Layman Receveur's Kitty Gentry.

Dick has written a big book with many characters and settings and a large library of historical and cultural information. Moveover, despite the suffering and death, the story's impact is moral and uplifting.