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Summary
Summary
" The Serpent King is a book you won't be able to resist or forget. The Southern boy in me savored every syllable and the reader in me fell in love with every page." --John Corey Whaley, National Book Award finalist and Printz Award winner
Dill has had to wrestle with vipers his whole life--at home, as the only son of a Pentecostal minister who urges him to handle poisonous rattlesnakes, and at school, where he faces down bullies who target him for his father's extreme faith and very public fall from grace.
He and his fellow outcast friends must try to make it through their senior year of high school without letting the small-town culture destroy their creative spirits and sense of self. Graduation will lead to new beginnings for Lydia, whose edgy fashion blog is her ticket out of their rural Tennessee town. And Travis is content where he is thanks to his obsession with an epic book series and the fangirl turning his reality into real-life fantasy.
Their diverging paths could mean the end of their friendship. But not before Dill confronts his dark legacy to attempt to find a way into the light of a future worth living.
Includes the song "Birds Fly South," performed by the author and Elin Palmer.
Praise for The Serpent King
"Zentner combines the melancholy of being 17 with the melancholy present in the best of Southern fiction and gives us a novel that will fill the infinite space that was left in your chest after you finished The Perks of Being a Wallflower ." -- BookRiot
"The Serpent King gripped me in its coils and kept me turning pages late into the night. A triumph of love and dignity."-- Stephanie Perkins , New York Times bestselling author
Reviews (6)
Horn Book Review
Three misfits in small-town Forrestville, Tennessee, have found solace in one another, but the start of senior year throws their vastly different posthigh school options into high relief. Dill, the son of a disgraced snake-handling preacher, knows hell spend the foreseeable future paying off his familys debts by working at the local grocer; likewise, Travis, whose father has only grown more abusive since the death of Traviss older brother in Afghanistan, is likely to escape Forrestville only in the pages of his beloved fantasy novels. But for fashion blogger Lydia, senior year marks not an ending but only the beginning of the beginning as she starts planning for college at NYU. The three friends relationships are complex and credible, both before and after a tragedy that throws Dill into a morass of depression and self-doubt. The adult characters are less well developed, frequently speaking in expository statements that contrast with the teens more realistic and engaging dialogue. However, Zentner rarely takes the easy way out thematically, instead vigorously wrestling with issues of Christian faith, family history, poverty, and mental health. In the end, readers will, like Dill, be left pondering where salvation lies: with God, with oneself, or with one another. norah piehl (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-The son of a snake-handling preacher imprisoned for possessing child pornography, Dill escapes his controlling mother and social ostracism with the help of his two friends, Lydia and Travis. As the trio round out their senior year, it becomes overwhelmingly apparent the different paths their lives are going to take-Travis is content working in a lumberyard and diving into a fantasy world from a book series in his spare time, while Lydia runs a popular fashion blog and is intent on attending New York University. As for Dill, he yearns for more than Forrestville, TN, can offer, but he feels compelled to honor his father's legacy and his mother's domineering wishes. As Dill grapples with a crush on Lydia and a mother who wants him to drop out of high school, a YouTube clip of Dill singing and playing guitar begins to garner attention. Dill must decide among what his heart wants, what his family needs, and his own desire for a life outside of their small town; "If you're going to live," he says, "you might as well do painful, brave, and beautiful things." Zentner offers a contemporary young adult novel that explores many issues common with teenagers today-bullying, life after high school, and the coming together and breaking apart of high school friendships. Thorough characterization and artful prose allow readers to intimately experience the highs and lows of these three friends. VERDICT Recommended for fans of John Green and Rainbow Rowell.-Amanda C. Buschmann, Atascocita Middle School, Humble, TX © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Forrestville, Tenn., named after Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, isn't exactly a welcome place for slightly ouside-the-mainstream folks like friends Dillard, Lydia, and Travis. Dill is a high school senior whose snake-handling preacher father is currently incarcerated; Lydia, a successful fashion blogger, plans on attending NYU after graduation; and Travis, large of body and gentle of soul, loses himself (and the pain of his father's physical and emotional abuse) in a fantasy series called Bloodfall. While Dill finds comfort and beauty in music, Travis's innate kindness belies his circumstances, and Lydia's incandescent, gleefully offbeat personality draws them together. As the novel, Zentner's debut, builds to a shocking act of violence that shatters the friends' world, this sepia-toned portrait of small-town life serves as a moving testament to love, loyalty, faith, and reaching through the darkness to find light and hope. Zentner explores difficult themes head on-including the desire to escape the sins of the father and the fragility of happiness-while tempering them with the saving grace of enduring friendship. Ages 14-up. Agent: Charlie Olsen, Inkwell Management. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In small-town Forrestville, Tennessee, broody musician Dill Early begins his senior year with a general feeling of dread because it means his best friend, Lydia, will be leaving for college once they graduate. As the son of a snake-handling Pentecostal preacher currently in prison, Dill is unable to escape his father's shadow. Lydia, on the other hand, is an outspoken blogger and fashionista, who can't wait to get out of Dodge. Completing their trio is Travis, a gentle giant who carries a staff and is obsessed with fantasy novels. In chapters that shift among the teens' perspectives, Zentner effectively shows the aspirations, fears, and dark secrets they harbor during their final year together. A musician himself, Zentner transitions to prose easily in his debut, pulling in complex issues that range from struggles with faith to abuse to grief. Refreshingly, this novel isn't driven by romance though it rears its head but by the importance of pursuing individual passions and forging one's own path. A promising new voice in YA.--Smith, Julia Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CERTAIN GROWN-UPS REVEL in dumb generalizations about young adult literature. They say that Y.A. lacks moral ambiguity; that it is too dark; that it doesn't depict empowered female sexuality; that it is populated by fields of sparkly vampires; that it sprang fully formed from the head of John Green. Nice try, reductive grown-ups. The only overarching thing that characterizes young adult literature is the age of the protagonist. Y.A. is sometimes fluffy, sometimes fanged, sometimes hot, sometimes cool. Its writers' voices are punk rock and hip-hop and symphonic and fizzy-poppy. As these summer fiction possibilities prove, Y.A. books can be as different from one another as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin is from Blind Lemon Jefferson. Let's start our "there are more things in heaven and earth" exploration with EVERY EXQUISITE THING (Little, Brown, $17.99), by Matthew Quick, the author of "The Silver Linings Playbook." It's about Nanette, a high school junior whose suburban, conformist life is blown wide open after she reads an out-of-print coming-of-age novel called "The Bubblegum Reaper." Soon she's hanging out with its reclusive author, Nigel Booker, and a teenage boy named Alex who's a fellow Booker acolyte. Nanette starts reading Bukowski and Philip Larkin, rebelling against her shallow parents, tossing away her soccer stardom because she has come to hate the game, and falling in love. But before long her life starts sliding out of control. "Every Exquisite Thing" is guilty of the "not like other girls" trope - the notion that while most girls are predictable and icky, this one has complex dreams and emotions that make her special. And since the other girls in "Every Exquisite Thing" are vapid, undifferentiated, peach-schnapps-swilling sexpots, no wonder Nanette is a singular creation who'd rather hang with dudes who tell her to read dude authors. The plots of "Every Exquisite Thing" and "The Bubblegum Reaper" parallel each other; both are about ambiguity and not being able to look to adults or convention for guidance on how to live a meaningful life. But Quick sometimes seems to mock Nanette's pain and pretensions in away that feels meanspirited. "I like listening to music and reading poetry and novels," she tells her friend Shannon. "I like seeing art house films. I like having philosophical discussions as I look up at a hunter's moon." Shannon replies, "Maybe you're just a snob, Nanette." Maybe she is. But the universe Quick has built for her doesn't offer an alternative. By the time I finished reading "Every Exquisite Thing" (the title is from "The Picture of Dorian Gray": "Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic"), my shoulders were somewhere around my upper ears. AS I read SCARLETT EPSTEIN HATES IT HERE (Razorbill/Penguin, $17.99), by Anna Breslaw, they inched back down. Scarlett has female friends who are smart and kind. She's a writer of fan fiction, so she doesn't treat canonical texts as gospel. Her stories are rooted in a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"-esque TV show about a boarding school in which half the students are werewolves. But after the show ends, she begins a new narrative based on the lives of her friends, her nemeses and her crush object, Gideon. Unlike Nanette, Scarlett is self-aware and mouthy, snarkily alert to the class divide in her suburban New Jersey town, where her family can't afford all the extras her classmates take for granted and she is used to being made fun of "for wearing thrift-store clothes (they weren't cool yet), bringing weird wholesale Sam's Club chocolate milk to lunch unlike everybody else's normal Nesquiks, and the million other tiny indicators kids can sniff out poorness with." She adores her best friend, Ave, but wishes Ave were more assertive. "If Ave had invented fire, she'd introduce it to the Cro-Magnons by whispering, 'Um, hey, I made this thing, it's kinda cool, it might be sorta helpful for our continued evolution, if that makes any sense.'" Scarlett is annoyed at herself for her crush on Gideon, who acts like a jerk with the popular boys instead of living his best life as the stand-up-comedy nerd he is in his soul. When Scarlett sees him in school the day after he and his posse have trashed her feminist, pot-smoking neighbor's garden, she has no idea what to say. "I freeze helplessly, torn between wanting to yell at him about his cisgender white male sense of entitlement and whisper to him that he smells like pine needles and dreams." Relatable. Alas, many of Scarlett's references don't sound very kidlike ("Glengarry Glen Ross"? "The Wire"? Reclaimed-wood tables? Flipping through Redbook in a waiting room?), and the plot is, to be charitable, shaky. A character dies solely to advance the protagonist's emotional arc. Feh. But Scarlett's goofy, cranky voice is fun nonetheless. Her story is writ small. THE SERPENT KING (Crown, $17.99), a debut by Jeff Zentner, on the other hand, is an ambitious, sui generis genre mash-up. The three main characters, who live in rural Tennessee, seem to come from three kinds of literature: Dill, with his snake-handling fundamentalist preacher father - currently incarcerated for possession of child pornography - and fearful, quietly manipulative mother, is straight out of Southern Gothic. His parents don't want him to go to college (his mother wants him to drop out of high school and make money), and with his soulful guitar playing, self-doubt and yearning, you ache for him to find his way into a different story. Lydia is a smart-mouthed fashionista and power blogger whose spiky voice is so well executed she could text with Scarlett. Travis is a lumbering, black-clad, dragon-pendant-wearing, staff-carrying guy who lives through his passion for a George R. R. Martin-style fantasy world. Zentner's great achievement - particularly impressive for a first novel - is to make us believe three such different people could be friends. He also manages to blend a dank, oppressive, Flannery O'Connor-esque sense of place with humor and optimism. I particularly looked forward to Travis's passionate narration as he pretends he's in the "Game of Thrones"-like world. (Having dinner at Lydia's well-stocked house, he composes in his head: "The harvest was good that year in Raynar Northbrook's lands, and they feasted often on the heavy oaken table that sat in his great hall. He called for bread and meat until he was sated.") The characters narrate their own chapters, which makes for some wild shifts in tone. The unredeemable monstrousness of Dill's and Travis's fathers may prove hard for some readers to take, and a senseless, drug-fueled tragedy may seem over the top. But I adored all three of these characters and the way they talked to and loved one another. Mariko Tamaki's SAVING MONTGOMERY SOLE (Roaring Brook, $17.99) is also about three friends, but it's far less wrenching to read. Montgomery and her friends Naoki and Thomas constitute the Jefferson High Mystery Club in Aunty, Calif. They hang out after school and discuss strange phenomena. One day Monty spots an online ad for the "Eye of Know," a mystical crystal amulet from an actual meteorite, on sale for only $5.99. She buys it, and unnerving things start to happen. The book's vivid California-ness - avocado trees and warm air and concrete - along with Thomas's out-and-proud gayness ("Remember we are orchids in a forest of carnations," he texts) and Naoki's sparkly air-sprite energy reminded me a bit of Francesca Lia Block's classic '90s Y.A. novel "Weetzie Bat." But Monty's voice is far more sardonic than Weetzie's. "The sky was that pulsing electric blue that it is here," she writes. "It's this unforgettable, I'm-so-blue-it-hurts blue that I've always found kind of ridiculous. It's blue like nail polish for club kids. Anyway, today I wasn't really minding it." "Saving Montgomery Sole" has the assured tone and meandering plot of Tamaki's strange and lovely graphic novel "This One Summer" (illustrated by Jillian Tamaki, who is her cousin and the illustrator of the Book Review's By the Book feature). Both books deal with inchoate rage and anxiety. Monty loves her two moms and her friends, but the presence of a homophobic right-wing preacher in town has her on edge, and being surrounded by teenagers who aren't as enlightened as her immediate circle makes her furious. "I could feel my brain filling up with angry bits, piling up like Ho Ho wrappers on a binge day," she says. "Like homework on a Sunday." There's no big revelation, no epiphany. The mystery of the amulet is never solved. Readers who find this maddening are not the right readers for this book. Readers who do not like human effluvia are not the right readers for THE HATERS (Amulet Books, $18.95). I must impress upon you how profane, vile and hilarious this book is. I laughed so hard I scared my cat off the couch multiple times, but if you have ever used the phrase "the coarsening of discourse," it is not for you. It's by Jesse Andrews, the author of "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl," which also had gross moments, but not this gross, and there was a dying girl, so the gross seemed in service of something noble. Not this time. "The Haters" is about Wes, Corey and Ash, who meet at jazz camp, start a band and flee on a long and filthy road trip. The depiction of jazz camp - with its hypercompetitive, fedora-wearing, skinny white guys trying to talk like Miles Davis - slays. One guy starts chatting up Wes, who was adopted from Venezuela, and when Wes asks him to stop talking like that, he says: "'Well, this is how I talk with the brothers back in South Philly. And they've never had a problem with it. But if you have a problem, man. ...' He nodded slowly. 'Then I got to thank you,' he said. 'For speaking your truth.'" It's clear why our heroes have to escape jazz camp. The three play in dives and eat junk food (the beef-flavored chips "had a taste that I would categorize as like a locker room, but for dogs") and sleep wherever they can ("Motel 6 is where you go if you've been evicted from your home and you need a place to do the meth that you just stole from the corpse of a prostitute," Ash pronounces) and meet lovely and scary people and have romantic interludes. What "The Haters" excels at is describing music. Here's how Andrews captures terrible improv jazz: "The trombones were botching goofball quotations like 'Flight of the Bumble-bee' and then signaling surrender with sheepish atonal elephant noises. And each of the saxophone solos was basically the equivalent of the small talk that you are forced to make with the friend of your mom who cuts your hair." And, helpfully for many readers, "if you don't know music, just know that if the band is playing in F but you're playing in E, it's going to sound simultaneously very whimsical and very horrible. It's basically a horror movie starring the Muppets." What "The Haters" does not excel at is girls. Ash is, shall we say, a poorly developed character. And there's a scene in which she is uncomfortably in the room while a comic-relief white hippie girl has several rounds of sex with a semiconscious Wes. (In the morning, when Wes is sober, Ash tells him, "You were just lying there murmuring, Please, no, and she was ordering you around in broken Spanish.") Not funny. But a lot in the book is. From the gross to the celestial: THE SQUARE ROOT OF SUMMER (Roaring Brook, $17.99), a debut by Harriet Reuter Hapgood, is a story of love and grief grounded in physics. Gottie Oppenheimer is a math and science genius in a small seaside town in Norfolk, England. Her mom died when she was born; now she's mourning her grandfather Grey's unexpected death. Her best friend, Thomas, who moved to Canada five years earlier, is coming back. She has strange gaps in her memory. And she starts experiencing disruptions in time and space. This is a novel for readers unafraid of science. There's talk of fractals, wormholes, black holes, the Gödel metric ("a solution to the E=MC^sup 2^ equation that 'proves' the past still exists"), Schrödinger's cat, string theory. Physics provides metaphors for loss, confusion and love. But there's humor, too, including terrible band names (Gottie's brother is a glam rocker) worthy of "The Haters": Fingerband, Synthmoan de Beauvoir, Jurassic Parkas. There are funny German words and delicious baked goods and crazy outfits. And Thomas is wonderful. When he tells Gottie how sorry he is about Grey's death, "it's the first time someone's hugged me since Oma and Opa, at Christmas. I stand there, made out of elbows. ... But after a moment, I wrap myself around him. It's a hug like warm cinnamon cake, and I sink into it." Later: "His kiss interrupts me, sudden-short-sweet. Unquestionable. It feels like reading a favorite book, and falling for the ending even though you already know what happens." The book is too long and has entirely too many physics analogies. But the delectable romance and the moment when past, present and future all come together and semi-solve the mysteries of Gottie's time travel make the journey worthwhile. Nothing about Julie Berry's THE PASSION OF DOLSSA (Viking, $18.99) should work. It is a 500-page book set in the 13th century, sprinkled with a medieval language called Old Provençal, about a young noblewoman who escapes a Dominican order that wants to burn her as a heretic. Yet I stayed up all night reading it and had tears in my eyes almost the entire time. Dolssa is an 18-year-old girl who has a Song of Songs-like relationship with God. "He caught me up on wings of light, and showed me the realms of his creation, the glittering gemstones paving his heaven," she says. "He left my body weak and spent, my spirit gorged with honey." The friars do not look kindly on this kind of talk. But Dolssa (miraculously?) escapes being thrown into the flames and winds up in the seaside village of Bajas. There she's cared for by three sisters who run a tavern and supplement their income by whoring (the oldest), fortunetelling (the youngest) and matchmaking (the middle sister). It turns out Dolssa can perform healing miracles. But an obsessed friar is tracking her through the countryside with near-sexual fixation, interviewing prostitutes as well as Jews and small-town clergymen about whether they've seen her. The language is gorgeous and evocative without seeming to try too hard. You practically smell the sea and taste the foamy ale. The characters have clearly differentiated voices; Dolssa sounds fancy and stilted for much of the book, while the sisters sound like the funny, earthy wenches they are. I cried partly because of the matter-of-fact kindness of the sisters - they care for others because it's the moral thing to do - and partly because of the parallels to our country now. There's a difference between being Christ-like and using Christ's name to oppress others, to silence women and persecute immigrants. I'm not sure how big an audience there is for a book like this. But I found it magnificent. Finally, we turn to another debut, THE STAR-TOUCHED QUEEN (St. Martin's Griffin, $18.99), by Roshani Chokshi, a fantasy drenched in Indian folklore. It's essentially a fairy tale, with a journey, an evil villain, minimal characterization and a happy ending. But lush, ornate ribbons of language are festooned over the bones of story, turning it into something rich and dizzying. Maya, a princess in Bharata, is rescued by a mysterious man named Amar. He smells of "mint and smoke, cardamom and wood." He can't tell Maya who he is until the new moon, but he's obviously trustworthy, because he says things like "I want to lie beside you and know the weight of your dreams." He tells her, "Come with me and you shall be an empress with the moon for your throne and constellations to wear in your hair." My teenage-demigoth self would have swooned. Amar and Maya ride through magical settings to his empty castle. Mirrors reflect "countries spiked with spires, turrets bursting with small ivy flowers, cities awash in color, and a thousand skies painted in vespertine violets of anxious nightfall waiting for stars, dawns just barely blooming pink and orange with new light, afternoons presiding over sleeping towns. ... It was all here." You either have to let yourself be swept along or wind up doing an Amazon search to find out how many times the word "glittering" appears. (Fifteen.) I was troubled by grammatical errors: "Girl that" rather than "girl who; "with myself" rather than "with me"; "He sunk beneath the water." But who cares, if you're a reader who imagines being bathed in milk, adorned with amethysts and kissed by a gorgeous stranger who says: "I know your soul. Everything else is an ornament." MARJORIE INGALL is a columnist at Tablet and the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book "Mamaleh Knows Best."
Kirkus Review
A touching debut chronicles the coming-of-age of three high school seniors, misfits and best friends. Neither Dill, Travis, nor Lydia feels at home in Forrestville, a small Tennessee town named after the founder of the Klu Klux Klan. Lydia's loving, prosperous parents have given her the tools to create a popular blog and the glittering prospect of college life in New York City. Travis, on the other hand, escapes his father's drunken brutality and his own heartbreak over his soldier brother's death by retreating into a fictional fantasy world. And Dillard Early Jr. can't escape his name: his snake-handling preacher father became notorious in these parts when he was incarcerated for child porn. SomeDill's mother among themblame Dill for his father's conviction. Lydia is determined to realize her dreams, and she is equally determined that the boys dream, too. Dill just wants Lydia to stay. Writing in third-person chapters that alternate among the three characters, Zentner covers the whole of their senior year, with heartbreak and a hopeful conclusion. Characters, incidents, dialogue, the poverty of the rural South, enduring friendship, a desperate clinging to strange faiths, fear of the unknown, and an awareness of the courage it takes to survive, let alone thrive, are among this fine novel's strengths. Zentner writes with understanding and gracea new voice to savor. (Fiction. 14 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Dill There were things Dillard Wayne Early Jr. dreaded more than the start of school at Forrestville High. Not many, but a few. Thinking about the future was one of them. Dill didn't enjoy doing that. He didn't much care for talking about religion with his mother. That never left him feeling happy or saved. He loathed the flash of recognition that usually passed across people's faces when they learned his name. That rarely resulted in a conversation he enjoyed. And he really didn't enjoy visiting his father, Pastor Dillard Early Sr., at Riverbend Prison. His trip to Nashville that day wasn't to visit his father, but he still had a nagging sense of unformed dread and he didn't know why. It might have been because school was starting the next day, but this felt different somehow than in years past. It would have been worse except for the excitement of seeing Lydia. The worst days spent with her were better than the best days spent without her. Dill stopped strumming his guitar, leaned forward, and wrote in the dollar-store composition book open on the floor in front of him. The decrepit window air conditioner wheezed, losing the battle against the mugginess of his living room. The thudding of a wasp at the window caught his attention over the laboring of the air conditioner. He rose from the ripped sofa and walked to the window, which he jimmied until it screeched open. Dill swatted the wasp toward the crack. "You don't want to stay in here," he murmured. "This house is no place to die. Go on. Get." It alighted on the sill, considered the house one more time, and flew free. Dill shut the window, almost having to hang from it to close it all the way. His mother walked in wearing her motel maid's uniform. She looked tired. She always did, which made her seem much older than her thirty-five years. "What were you doing with the window open and the AC on? Electricity's not free." Dill turned. "Wasp." "Why you all dressed to leave? You going somewhere?" "Nashville." Please don't ask the question I know you're going to ask. "Visiting your father?" She sounded both hopeful and accusatory. "No." Dill looked away. His mother stepped toward him and sought his eyes. "Why not?" Dill avoided her glare. "Because. That's not why we're going." "Who's we?" "Me. Lydia. Travis. Same as always." She put a hand on her hip. "Why you going, then?" "School clothes." "Your clothes are fine." "No they're not. They're getting too small." Dill lifted his skinny arms, his T-shirt exposing his lean stomach. "With what money?" His mother's brow--already more lined than most women's her age--furrowed. "Just my tips from helping people to their cars with their groceries." "Free trip to Nashville. You should visit your father." You better go visit your father or else, you mean. Dill set his jaw and looked at her. "I don't want to. I hate it there." She folded her arms. "It's not meant to be fun. That's why it's prison. Think he enjoys it?" Probably more than I enjoy it. Dill shrugged and gazed back out the window. "Doubt it." "I don't ask for much, Dillard. It would make me happy. And it would make him happy." Dill sighed and said nothing. You ask for plenty without ever actually asking for it. "You owe him. You're the only one with enough free time." She would hang it over his head. If he didn't visit, she would make it hurt worse for longer than if he gave in. The dread in Dill's stomach intensified. "Maybe. If we have time." As his mother was about to try to drag a firmer commitment from him, a bestickered Toyota Prius zoomed up his road and screeched to a stop in front of his house with a honk. Thank you, God. "I gotta go," Dill said. "Have a good day at work." He hugged his mother goodbye. "Dillard--" But he was out the door before she had the chance. He felt burdened as he stepped into the bright summer morning, shielding his eyes against the sun. The humidity mounted an assault even at nine-twenty in the morning--like a hot, wet towel wrapped around his face. He glanced at the peeling white Calvary Baptist Church up the street from his house. He squinted to read the sign out of habit. no jesus, no peace. know jesus, know peace. What if you know Jesus but have no peace? Does that mean the sign is wrong, or does that mean you don't know Jesus quite as well as you think? Dill hadn't been raised to consider either a particularly good outcome. He opened the car door and got in. The frigid air conditioning made his pores shrink. "Hey, Lydia." She grabbed a worn copy of The Secret History off the passenger seat before Dill sat on it, and tossed it in the backseat. "Sorry I'm late." "You're not sorry." "Of course I'm not. But I have to pretend. Social contractual obligations and whatnot." You could set your clock by Lydia's being twenty minutes late. And it was no use trying to trick her by telling her to meet you at a time twenty minutes before you really wanted to meet. That only made her forty minutes late. She had a sixth sense. Lydia leaned over and hugged Dill. "You're already sweaty and it's still morning. Boys are so gross." The black frames of her glasses creaked against his cheekbone. Her tousled smoky-blue hair--the color of a faded November sky streaked with clouds--smelled like honey, fig, and vetiver. He breathed it in. It made his head swim in a pleasant way. She had dressed for Nashville in a vintage sleeveless red gingham blouse with black high-waisted denim shorts and vintage cowboy boots. He loved the way she dressed--every twist and turn, and there were many. Dill buckled his seat belt the instant before her acceleration pressed him into his seat. "Sorry. I don't have access to AC that makes August feel like December." He sometimes went days without feeling air as cool as in Lydia's car except for when he opened the refrigerator. She reached out and turned the air conditioning down a couple of clicks. "I think my car should fight global warming in every possible way." Dill angled one of the vents toward his face. "You ever think about how weird it is that Earth is hurtling through the black vacuum of space, where it's like a thousand below zero, and meanwhile we're down here sweating?" "I often think about how weird it is that Earth is hurtling through the black vacuum of space and meanwhile you're down here being a total weirdo." "So, where are we going in Nashville? Opry Mills Mall or something?" Lydia glared at him and looked back at the road. She extended her hand toward him, still looking forward. "Excuse me, I thought we'd been best friends since ninth grade, but apparently we've never even met. Lydia Blankenship. You are?" Dill took advantage of the opportunity to take her hand. "Dillard Early. Maybe you've heard of my father by the same name." It had thoroughly scandalized Forrestville, Tennessee, when Pastor Early of the Church of Christ's Disciples with Signs of Belief went to the state penitentiary--and not for the reasons anyone expected. Everyone assumed he'd get in trouble someday for the twenty-seven or so rattlesnakes and copperheads his congregants passed around each Sunday. No one knew with certainty what law they were breaking, but it seemed unlawful somehow. And the Tennessee Department of Wildlife did take custody of the snakes after his arrest. Or people thought perhaps he'd run afoul of the law by inducing his flock to drink diluted battery acid and strychnine, another favored worship activity. But no, he went to Riverbend Prison for a different sort of poison: possession of more than one hundred images depicting a minor engaged in sexual activity. Lydia tilted her head and squinted. "Dillard Early, huh? The name rings a bell. Anyway, yes, we're driving an hour and a half to Nashville to go to Opry Mills Mall and buy you the same sweatshop garbage that Tyson Reed, Logan Walker, Hunter Henry, their intolerable girlfriends, and all of their horrible friends will also be wearing on the first day of senior year." "I ask a simple question--" She raised a finger. "A stupid question." "A stupid question." "Thank you." Dill's eyes fell on Lydia's hands at the steering wheel. They were slender, with long, graceful fingers; vermilion-colored nails; and lots of rings. The rest of her wasn't ungraceful but her fingers were affirmatively and aggressively graceful. He relished watching her drive. And type. And do everything she did with her hands. "Did you call Travis to tell him you were running late?" "Did I call you to tell you I was running late?" She took a turn fast, squealing her tires. "No." "Think it'll come as a surprise to him that I'm running late?" "Nope." The August air was a steamy haze. Dill could already hear the bugs, whatever they were called. The ones that made a pulsing, rattling drone on a sweltering morning, signaling that the day would only grow hotter. Not cicadas, he didn't think. Rattlebugs. That seemed as good a name as any. "What am I working with today?" Lydia asked. Dill gave her a blank stare. She held up her hand and rubbed her fingers together. "Come on, buddy, keep up here." "Oh. Fifty bucks. Can you work with that?" She snorted. "Of course I can work with that." "Okay, but no dressing me weird." Lydia extended her hand to him again--more forcefully, as though karate chopping a board. "No, but seriously. Have we met? What was your name again?" Dill grasped her hand again. Any excuse. "You're in a mood today." "I'm in the mood to receive a little credit. Not much. Don't spoil me." "Wouldn't dream of it." "In the last two years of school shopping, have I ever made you look ridiculous?" "No. I mean, I still caught hell for stuff, but I'm sure that would've happened no matter what I wore." "It would. Because we go to school with people who wouldn't recognize great style if it bit them right on their ass. I have a vision for you, planted in rustic Americana. Western shirts with pearl snaps. Denim. Classic, masculine, iconic lines. While everyone else at Forrestville High tries desperately to appear as though they don't live in Forrestville, we'll embrace and own your rural Southernness, continuing in the vein of 1970s Townes Van Zandt meets Whiskeytown-era Ryan Adams." "You've planned this." Dill savored the idea of Lydia thinking about him. Even if only as a glorified mannequin. "Would you expect less?" Dill breathed in the fragrance of her car. Vanilla car freshener mixed with french fries, jasmine-orange-ginger lotion, and heated makeup. They were almost to Travis's house. He lived close to Dill. They stopped at an intersection, and Lydia took a selfie with her cell phone and handed it to Dill. "Get me from your angle." "You sure? Your fans might start thinking you have friends." "Hardy har. Do it and let me worry about that." A couple of blocks later, they pulled up to the Bohannon house. It was white and rundown with a weathered tin roof and wood stacked on the front porch. Travis's father perspired in the gravel driveway, changing out the spark plugs on his pickup that had the name of the family business, Bohannon Lumber, stenciled on the side. He cast Dill and Lydia a briny glare, cupped his hand to his mouth, and yelled, "Travis, you got company," saving Lydia the trouble of honking. "Pappy Bohannon looks to be in a bit of a mood himself," Lydia said. "To hear Travis tell it, Pappy Bohannon is in a permanent mood. It's called being a giant asshole, and it's incurable." A moment or two passed before Travis came loping outside. Ambling, perhaps. Whatever bears do. All six feet, six inches, and 250 pounds of him. His shaggy, curly red hair and patchy red teenager beard were wet from the shower. He wore his signature black work boots, black Wranglers, and baggy black dress shirt buttoned all the way up. Around his neck, he wore a necklace with a chintzy pewter dragon gripping a purple crystal ball--a memento from some Renaissance festival. He always wore it. He carried a dog-eared paperback from the Bloodfall series, something else he was seldom without. Halfway to the car, he stopped, raised a finger, and spun and ran back to the house, almost tripping over his feet. Lydia hunched over, her hands on the wheel, watching him. "Oh no. The staff," she murmured. "He forgot the staff." Dill groaned and did a facepalm. "Yep. The staff." "The oaken staff," Lydia said in a grandiose, medieval voice. "The magic staff of kings and lords and wizards and . . . elves or whatever." Travis returned, clutching his staff, symbols and faces carved on it with clumsy hands. His father glanced up with a pained expression, shook his head, and resumed work. Travis opened the car door. "Hey, guys." "The staff? Really?" Lydia said. "I bring it on journeys. 'Sides, what if we need it to protect ourselves? Nashville is dangerous." "Yeah," Lydia said, "but it's not dangerous because of all the staff-wielding brigands. They have guns now. Gun beats staff in gun-staff-scissors." "I highly doubt we'll get in a staff fight in Nashville," Dill said. "I like it. It makes me feel good to have it." Lydia rolled her eyes and put the car into gear. "Bless your heart. Okay, boys. Let's do this. The last time we ever go school shopping together, thank the sweet Lord." And with that pronouncement, Dill realized that the dread in his stomach wouldn't be going away any time soon. Maybe never. The final indignity? He doubted he'd even get a good song out of it. 2 Lydia The Nashville skyline loomed in the distance. Lydia liked Nashville. Vanderbilt was on her college list. Not high on the list, but there. Thinking about colleges put her in a good mood, as did being in a big city. All in all, she felt a lot happier than she had the day before the start of any school year in her life. She could only imagine what she'd be feeling the day before next school year--freshman year of college. As they entered the outskirts of Nashville, Dill stared out the window. Lydia had given him her camera and assigned him to be expedition photographer, but he forgot to take pictures. He had his normal faraway affect and distinct air of melancholy. Today seemed different somehow, though. Lydia knew that visits to Nashville were a bittersweet affair for him because of his father, and she'd consciously tried to pick a route that would differ from the one he took to visit the prison. She spent a fair amount of time on Google Maps plotting, but to no avail. There were only so many routes from Forrestville to Nashville. Excerpted from The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
