A Killing in This Town

October 3, 2005
The horrors of the lynch mob inform every paragraph of this viscerally moving novel that gives the backstory to the 1998 James Byrd murder. In Jim Crow–era Bullock, Miss., a white boy's passage into manhood demands a grotesque ritual: he must "go out to a nigger's house and call him out of it" and, with his fellow Klansmen, drag him to death behind a horse. Preacher Earl Thomas knows that he will be "called out" next, just as white Adam Pickens, soon to turn 13, dreads the part he must play in this imminent killing. Will these characters find a way out of the cycle of violence? Rejecting the conventions of chronology and character development, Vernon collapses time: memory, dream and portent are ever-present as characters wrestle with ghosts, guilt, fear and the chance of hope. A fugue of folk idiom, blues, biblical diction and surreal imagery makes for lots of atmosphere, but characters without much dimension: blacks are scarcely individuated; whites are mere repositories of cretinous hatred. As a result, while the stench of evil wafts nauseatingly from the page, the actual lives remain strangely distant.