A KILLING IN THIS TOWN

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 absolutely determined to see.