GREENBONES

In this latest gritty little novel by the talented Miss Williams, the Biblical, somewhat paternal, image of the green bay tree is replaced by a more contemporary vision, as the author has created one of the meanest, most hateful females ever to run like ""wild weeds"" through the painful pages of a young man's odyssey. Ripping Nin from the love of his brother Foe, and from his taciturn father, his tough-fibered mother, ""Doesticks,"" sets her ""Greenbones"" on his enforced pilgrimage, through the small, poverty-bitten town of the South, where he is pierced by evil and almost destroyed. Exploited fully by Doesticks as a boy preacher, denied the education she had promised him, with benefactors driven off, Nin escapes briefly only to be sent to prison and a chain gang. At the last, Nin, full with grief and loss and betrayal as his only friend is ruined and dies, as the news of Foe's death comes to him, can now anticipate the nature of a soulless expediency crippling innocence, with a world of latent violence and evil easy to ignite. As a man, Nin, no longer green, his eyes bright with the knowledge of the cackling evil that dogs him, prepares to take on the world--ruefully, sadly, bitterly--Doesticks style. Sour and persistent as tarpitch--a disturbing and chilling tale, splendidly ornamented with folk jargon, edging into allegory.