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Fifteen-year-old Huger Dillard and his blind uncle
discover a body in the woods. Huger tells the story. Soon another murder happens, and
then suspicion falls upon the uncle. Could he have done this, or will the two of them be
able to find out what’s really going on in and around the Hunt Club in South Carolina
before someone else gets hurt?
The page count here is a slight, but the
story lingers after you put it down. While I was reading it, I kept thinking about Toni
Morrison’s book, Playing in the Dark, which I’d read a few months before. In
her essays, she talks about the usual literary associations given to “black” vs. those
for “white.” For some reason, I found myself thinking about those words, and how the
author used them here. That got me thinking about the difference between blindness and
ignorance too. How interesting that a mystery story can lead you to consider such
things.
I particularly liked this passage near the end of the book:
“…there is another kind of seeing, a way of looking in front of you and seeing maybe what
you can’t really see, a way of knowing something without knowing it. There is a kind of
darkness that allows you, and the leaves, the fallen branches and low places where water
fills in, all of it there before you and shrouded in a kind of knowledge you can only get
with being inside the dark of it.”
The mystery is a good one, and the
writing is fast-paced and wastes no time, but I loved the previous paragraph for the way
in which the young narrator struggles to find the words to describe his experience, to
make sense of it all. And I can’t pinpoint it exactly, but the story resonates with a
kind of faith in people and in other things as well.
Still, this is
just a mystery that hooks you from the start. Then you’ll read until you find out what
really happened in the woods near the Hunt Club.
