A Killing in This Town: A Novel

by Olympia Vernon

Overview

Award-winning author Olympia Vernon’s third novel, A Killing in This Town, is a taut, poetic masterpiece that exhumes a horrific epoch from the annals of the American South.
There is a menace in the woods of Bullock County, Mississippi, and not only for the black man destined to be lynched when a white boy comes of age. The white men who work at the Plant are in danger, too, but they refuse to heed Earl Thomas’s urgent message that the factory is slowly killing them; turning a deaf ear to the black pastor. Thomas knows he should try to deliver the message again, but he hears the blood of his murdered friend calling to him from the ground, and fears that he will be the next black man to be dragged to his death. Adam Pickens, a white boy now on the eve of his thirteenth birthday, isn’t sure he wants to wear the garb being readied for him by the Klan seamstress, or participate in the town’s ugly ritual. It is only when Gill Mender—a man haunted by past sins—returns that redemption seems possible. A transfixing and pivotal work of fiction, A Killing in This Town exposes the fragile hierarchy of a society poisoned by hatred, and shows the power of an individual to stand up to the demons of history and bring the cycle of violence to an end.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555847531
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	12/01/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	388,778
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Olympia Vernon is the author of the award-winning novels Eden and Logic. She grew up in a small town on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana, the fourth of seven children. She has a degree in Criminal Justice, and an M.F.A. from Louisiana State University. Vernon is the winner of a 2004 Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the Academy of the Arts and Letters, a 2005 Louisiana Governor's Arts Award in the Professional Artist category, has twice been granted the Matt Clark Memorial Scholarship, and was nominated for the Robert O. Butler Award in Fiction in 2000. She lives in New Orleans.

Editorial Reviews

…, [Vernon] vividly lays out a collection of blasted lives.
— The New York Times

Maud Casey

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. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Told as an allegory, this novel by Vernon (Eden) presents a story of racism and hatred in a Mississippi town controlled by the Ku Klux Klan. In this town, a rite of passage for a 13-year-old boy involves summoning a black man from his house, tying him to a pulley, and dragging him behind a horse until dead. The tale is stripped to the bare essentials of fear and animalism, but the stylized prose obscures more than illuminates. Readers will struggle to figure out what is going on, let alone find the deeper significance, and will be rewarded for their efforts with recurring images of the mutilated corpse and klansmen reveling in the results of the subsequent autopsy. As with most allegories, the characters are more symbolic than fully realized, and the narrative's eerie, supernatural quality clashes with its anatomical imagery. For Southern literary fiction collections only.-Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

From Southerner Vernon (Eden, 2003, etc.), an unflinching, relentless drama set in the lynching culture of the KKK. The murderous coming-of-age ritual for 13-year-old white boys in segregated Bullock, Miss., involves dragging a black man behind a wagon until his corpse disintegrates. The town's white residents are still humming from the murder five years before of Curtis Willow, dragged and strung up in the woods by a society of Klansmen led by Hoover Pickens and bloodthirsty brothers Salem and Hurry Bullock. The siblings were overseers at the Pauer Plant until it closed after 30 years of polluting the lungs of its workers. Hurry is now the town's elected coroner; Hoover's young son Adam is next in line for the grisly coming-of-age ritual; and the town's only black pastor, Earl Thomas, is the intended victim. But Adam is sensitive and God-fearing; his doubts aren't eased when Hurry shoots Adam's beloved dog, Midnight, because the loyal pet threatens to get in the way of the ceremony. A stranger arrives to secretly help Adam manage his training for the Klan. Five years earlier, Gill was the initiate ordered to drag Curtis Willow, but this time he has had a change of heart. Gill secretly warns Thomas and with Adam engineers a reversal of the murderous initiation ceremony by substituting bodies so that Earl, his wife and Curtis's widow can get out of town. Vernon returns obsessively in her narrative to Curtis's horrendous murder, which taints every aspect of the town. The author's metaphorical language reflects the drama's oppressive physicality, but it also leads her into elliptical, torturous and nearly unreadable passages. This is a powerful, difficult work by a writer absolutelydetermined to see.

Kirkus Reviews