A Killing in This Town: A Novel [Paperback]

Olympia Vernon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 11, 2007

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 Townexposes 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Earl Thomas tried to warn the white men of Bullock, Mississippi, about the lung disease the plant they worked in was causing. Now he knows it is only a matter of time before they come for him. The rite of passage for white boys in Bullock is to get their first Klan robe at 13 and then call out their first black man to be dragged through the woods until he is dead. Adam Pickens is almost 13, and his father works at the plant. Sickened by what he has to do, Adam is more than ready to listen to Gill Mender, who carries the guilt of his own rite. With the help of both communities, a strange kind of justice is achieved. The novel shows the debilitating cancer of hatred and prejudice and the beauty of the effort to stop the violence. In language reminiscent of Toni Morrison and William Faulkner, Vernon weaves a powerful yet dreamlike story of our not-too-distant past. Elizabeth Dickie
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (January 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802142966
• ISBN-13: 978-0802142962
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,736,354 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, Powerful, and Brave, March 15, 2006

By 

M. A. Harper (New Orleans, LA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Killing in This Town: A Novel (Hardcover)

Olympia Vernon's words always sing, but never more powerfully than in this strong, brave, unflinching look at hate and love. The novel reads like a song, like something that wasn't made up by one immensely talented young novelist but was a truth always with us from a time long before: a psalm, a ballad, a folk song. Her characters rocket toward their fates with the tragic inevitability of opera. Vernon's language is poetry of such stark originality that it sometimes seems like a new tongue. In its fresh and alarming syntax, the sad old drama of racial hatred and intolerance cuts through contemporary complacency like a hacksaw through living bone.

Truth never grows stale in the telling. Crucial, terrible truths--cruelty, racism, hatred, bigotry--are the dark shadows against which light, if any of us are capable of generating any light at all, must be seen. Vernon's Mississippi lightbringers shine out against their darknesses with courage and love and the need for redemption, alive to small beauties like hummingbirds, leafy forests, loving marriages and one good dog. A reader emerges from the time in their company like a listener after a hymn well sung, but one that packs a punch and isn't afraid to pull off a surprise or two.

As a nation, we would do well to continue the honest racial dialogue Vernon's begun here, because she's not one to look away from hard facts and hide her head in the sand. Too many of us, black and white, talk at each other rather than TO each other. But this book, a product of the author's artless way with words, is a truth-teller and page-turner of the highest order. You know who the good guys are, and you love them and root for them not because they are abstracts of goodness, but because they live and breathe and sweat and fear.

Olympia Vernon is a national treasure. The common ground she provides us with here is something that can support the weight of mighty, mighty beauty.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Full Circle, January 11, 2009

By 

Brandon Bennett "truth seeker" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Killing in This Town: A Novel (Paperback)

I have always hesitated to pen a review for one of Olympia Vernon's novels. What words can a mortal reader possibly conjure to lavish "praise" or dish "crticism" on an artist so clearly annointed by the angels? I have always finished Olympia's novels with the same feeling: a thoroughly awed and sometimes-frightened reverence. From her debut "Eden" and now with "A Killing in This Town," she has served fearless notice to the old vanguard of the letters that torches are meant to be passed and kept aflame, not hoarded until their blaze is snuffed out.
I have finally mustered the strength to review this book; the time simply feels right for me. We have arrived at a point in America's history that has posited us at the doorstep of a new era of the oft-cited change, and a hope for equality. But stories like "A Killing" still transpire in modern-day cities and rural areas. This novel is almost a travel guide into the true hearts of men. Racism is still alive and well in this, the mightest-yet-now-weakened nation on Earth. Do yourself a favor whether you voted for our President-Elect or not, and read this novel. It is a vicarious exploration into the bloody founding of our united states, and an uncompromising indictment of apathy by one of the loudest literary voices of our generation.
Kudos, Olympia Vernon. And continue.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Olympia Sets the Bar High For Novelists, December 27, 2007

By 

Venessia Young "Mississippi Chocolate Chick" (Ridgeland, MS United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Killing in This Town: A Novel (Paperback)

This book was so beautiful and compelling--I did not want to see it end. Olympia takes us to a time when hatred and racial conflict are thick enough to cut with a knife. Adam, a boy born into a home full of Ku Klux Klan will have to uphold the ritual of calling a "nigger" from his home and leading the dragging of the black man through the woods until he is dead. Gill, the last young white boy that was initiated into the Klan, can't get the innocent black man out of his sytem. His self-hate can only be reversed if he rights that wrong that he commited over 13 years ago. Gill comes back to lead Adam on the path to redemption and help to bridge the racial divide in Bullock. Will Adam continue on with family tradition??? Is Bullock destined to stay ruled by the "free and automatic white men"?? You have to read this beautiful book to find out. This book is poetic and I promise you will not be disappointed if you are looking for a book with substance.