Though it is 2017, five years after losing her husband and son in an
accident, Imogene Coulter is still grieving.
Then she finds a young child living in the locked basement of a
boarded-up house on her family property.
Who is he and how did he come to be there? Imogene is convinced that her father, Grand
Wizard of the Knights of the Southern Georgia Order, who just died, was
involved in keeping the child captive. Though
Imogene has rejected her family’s racism, her family has a long connection to
the Ku Klux Klan, and her brother Eddie, sister Jo Lynne, and brother-in-law
Garland are active members of the KKK.
Besides Imogene’s story, we are given the perspective of Tillie,
Imogene’s father-in-law, who left the Klan forty years earlier. And then there’s the first-person narration
of Beth, a ten-year-old girl, who was abducted from her home in 2010. What happened to Beth since the child in the
basement is a young boy named Christopher?
Who is the boy’s Mama whom Christopher claims is always brought back to
the basement?
There are major plausibility problems with the plot. It is unbelievable that Imogene does not
realize the identity of the person keeping Christopher captive. Imogene’s mother seems almost totally
oblivious to what is happening around her.
Beth’s behaviour in the last scene which she narrates doesn’t make
sense. A policeman who has lived in the
town for ten years is so naïve about the actions of the Klan in his town?
Mystery is the technique used to create suspense, but in many ways, the
author’s message takes precedence over the narrative. The title, for example, refers to people not
paying sufficient attention to the rise of white nationalism: “Regardless of when it first began, Tillie
didn’t see it coming, this rising of the Klan yet again, because he had let
himself get rusty. For too many years,
those sorts had been out of sight, and so they were out of mind too. For too many years, he’s been gone too long
from paying attention. A lot of folks
have been gone too long.”
Interspersed throughout the book are short chapters outlining the
history of the Ku Klux Klan. The last of
these chapters mentions the 2017 rally in Charlottesville and the white
supremacists’ praising President Trump for refusing to specifically hold them
accountable for what happened. The last
page of the novel has an explicit warning:
“while those men no longer march past, dressed in their robes and hoods
and carrying torches, they’re still out there, just underfoot.”
This book has an important message; unfortunately, that theme is
developed in an unwieldy fashion. The
novel has much real-world resonance so I wish it were of better literary
quality.
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