Beautiful Dreamer
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In a small Southern town, a white man tries to prevent a lynching and finds himself branded by the mob --- and worse, finds himself sheltering the dead man's son. When the killers come around to finish the job, the two victims are forced to flee across the country in the hopes of escaping men with nothing but vengeance on their minds.
Just one step behind the vigilantes a solitary lawman tracks the men as he wrestles with the choice to either turn the customary blind eye or to put a stop to the intolerable logic of racial hatred. As the point of view moves seamlessly between characters, Christopher Bigsby crafts what Booklist calls a "taut, poetic narrative that has all the hypnotic power of an incantation."
Dark and gritty, Beautiful Dreamer traces the struggle between reluctant good and dedicated evil, where morality is a matter of life or death and the choices made have consequences as lasting as they are unexpected.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
English author Bigsby unflinchingly explores a mushrooming tragedy that begins when a black man walks through the front door of a white-owned store in turn-of-the-century rural Tennessee in his fourth novel (first published in Britain). The black man is lynched for raping the store owner's wife, even though Jake Benchley, a white widower in his 50s who witnessed the confrontation, argues the only crime the man committed was not using the back door. The lynch mob beats Jake nearly to death and brands his chest with an "N" (as in "nigger") for his insistence on the truth. The dead man's boy, James, latches onto Jake after witnessing the lynching and shoots dead twin brothers of the notoriously spiteful Steadman clan who show up at Jake's home to wreak more havoc. The two mismatched fugitives flee hunting dogs and the murdered twins' brothers, as well as the sheriff and his agents, who catch wind of the shootings. Bigsby's tale gains a full head of suspenseful steam through concrete description ("There was a groan and the first brother moved an arm like something that had been run over on the road") and the relationship Jake and James forge, equal parts brothers-in-arms and father and son.
