Customer Reviews

Serpent And The Spirit: Glenn Summerford'S Story

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By employing a non-traditional, storytelling technique making use of court records and transcriptions of taped interviews, Thomas Burton has told a documentary-like tale of people whose lives are as confusing and bizarre as any that Flannery O'Conner's fiction could have created. Glenn Summerford, a serpent-handling, Holiness preacher was accused of attempted murder, convicted, and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. His wife Darlene alleged that he forced her at gunpoint, while he was in a drunken rage, to put her hand into a box of poisonous snakes that Glenn kept at home for use in his church services. She was, according to medical attendants, bitten and hospitalized, but "the truth" of the matter is clouded from the outset. Some of those interviewed claim the whole court procedure was rigged in an attempt to rid Jackson County, Alabama, of Summerford and the practices of his congregation -- which church members sincerely believe is a way for them to show their obedience to the Word of God. Glenn's two wives, as well as his children by both women, all have differing accounts of what could have happened -- and for the motives of those involved.

No matter what the reality of the situation, Burton has tried to unravel, as Robert Browning did with his verse monologues in The Ring and the Book, the immensely complicated, and ultimately unfathomable mess that life can be for all of us, and the writer has done so in a highly entertaining and readable fashion.--Michael Davenport

Read this book cover to cover--even more than once, as I have--and you still won't know if he did or didn't do it. This book grabs you by the collar and shakes you from its very first page and doesn't let go, even after you've finished the book.

The characters are as complex as any Agatha Christie every created, and Burton's characters are very, VERY real! They are as rural as people can be in the USA, but that does not make them simple, certainly not, as stereotypes would have it, simple-minded. They calmly stand their ground and let you know (1) that they are every bit as right in their beliefs about handling poisonous snakes as Native American medicine men (my words, not theirs), and (2) they do not believe Glenn Sommerford made any effort to murder his wife. And if you think they are just delusional followers of a fanatical religious cult figure, then you haven't read the book.

Even Glenn's son by the wife he is accused of trying to murder says...well, I think you need to read it for yourself.

One fair warning is in order: Don't tackle this book until you are sure you are ready to have all your beliefs about rural indiginous Appalachian mountain dwellers, snake-handling fundamentalist Christians and justice in American courts shaken to their very foundations. This book sends a torando right through your comfort zone.

One reading, and you'll be on the "Free Glenn Summerford" bandwagon in two shakes of a rattler's tail!