TROUBLE IN JULY

Caldwell paints his picture in grotesque symbols. His grim, sardonic humor breaks occasionally through the dark clouds of his horrors; his gift for condensation, for drama, makes his stories etch themselves sharply on the mind and the emotions. This is the story of a lynching, a lynching that proved to have no basis and that resulted in another crime. Into the movement is caught one phase after another of the community, -- the sheriff who goes fishing to avoid trouble, the two rival plantation owners who turn the lynching posse into a farce, the political embroglio, the fanatical white woman who stirs them up, the pathetic little darky who takes his white rabbit into hiding with him for company. Race horrors, intimidation, all in all a biting indictment of the lower middle class elements of the Deep South. Not a book for conservatives or for the thin-skinned. But a better book than Caldwell has done for some time.