SEASON OF THE SNAKE

Second-novelist Davis (Winter Range, 2000) presents another powerful and suspenseful tale that taps the violent side of masculine nature.

Back home in Mississippi, where they grew up, sisters Meredith and Nance didn’t have a lot of luck with men: drawn chronically to battering, abusive lovers, Meredith would end up in the emergency room, while the older Nance, cool-headed and focused, became a distraught widow when the love of her life, her husband Joe, was struck down by hoodlums in the park. After moving to Lewiston, Idaho, to pursue her work as a herpetologist, and after marrying an elementary school principal, Nance finally seems blessed, even when her sister and harbinger of grief also moves to Lewiston. Meredith doesn’t trust men, and certainly not Nance’s husband, Ned, whose reticence about himself leaves her feeling he’s withholding “some knowledge exclusively in his keeping.” Davis gradually builds suspense from this “withheld knowledge,” tracking both Nance as she hunts snakes on wilderness trips to identify and bag them for the lab, and creepy husband Ned as he disappears for increasingly longer periods of time on shadowy errands—moving from peeping Tom to bona fide sex criminal. Besides an occasional heavy-handedness on the snake metaphor (Nance “shed[s] the scales from her eyes”), Davis’s writing is masterful, revealing a deft sense of relationships—including sisterly love—that are sometimes so stiflingly close that they exclude other people, as in Ned’s case, and sometimes so volatile that they’re capable of creating vicious resentment. Nance’s first marriage to Joe is tenderly, heartbreakingly depicted before it vanishes like a dream, while her second, to the orderly, attentive Ned, is carefully and skillfully delineated. Moreover, Davis isn’t afraid to provoke some compelling questions about violence against women and the guilt subsequently felt by the victim.

A chilling peek into the snake-charmer’s pit.