Come in at the Door

His debut novel, Company K, introduced William March to the reading public as a gifted writer of modern fiction. Of that World War I classic Graham Greene wrote: It is the only war book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes.” After Company K, March brought his same unerring style to a cycle of novels and short storieshis Pearl County” seriesinspired in part by his childhood in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama.Come In at the Door is the first novel in that series. Before dawn one morning, little Chester is taken by his nurse, his father's mistress, to the courthouse in Athlestan, a county seat in the Deep South. A sensitive and impressionable boy, Chester watches in horror while one of his father's mixed-race servants is hanged as punishment for killing a hunchback he believed had laid a conjure” on him. The apathy of the townspeople toward the servant's suffering and execution play a vital part in Chester's fascinating development. Throughout his conventional childhood and rambunctious manhood in a port town, the gruesome memory of the Athlestan gallows hovers just below the surface of his mind. He recalls the gruesome details only at his father's death, when the book sweeps forward to its shattering denouement.