In a Temple of Trees

by Suzanne Hudson

Book Overview

A witness to a murder is still haunted by a dark secret decades later and becomes involved in an unstoppable chain reaction leading, ultimately, back to the truth in this spellbinding story of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931561419
• ISBN13: 9781931561419
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing
• Length: 355 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A Vital, Intense Novel Of The Deep South - Superbly Written!

Big Jack McCormick owns Camp DoeRun, a cushy hunting lodge built on his own private parcel of West Alabama woods. Flush with game, this singular piece of forest is reserved for McCormick and his fellow huntsmen, a select group of five, in particular. These white men, are all honchos, pillars of their Three Breezes, Alabama community - the sheriff, an attorney, a bank president and McCormick's smarmy right-hand man. They get together regularly, far from their wives and families, their lip service to moral codes and the letter of the law left behind, to catch fish, shoot dove, turkey, and deer, drink, dine well and play with women, brought in especially for their fun and titillation. The aberrant is encouraged. Sometimes, there is just one women for all five, usually a beauty. Then the men would play "The Game." On a brisk November night in 1958, twelve year-old Cecil Durgin, a "colored orphan," was working up at DoeRun. He had been trained to accompany the hunters, flush the game, skin and field dress deer, cook, clean, fetch and carry. On this one fall evening, which is to mark Cecil's life forever, he witnesses the perverse Game as it is played-out, and the vicious murder at the evening's finale. At his young age, the boy knows, as did most African Americans, that "life could be taken on any whim or mangled on a dare, that his own silence meant life." This lesson is brought home brutally the following morning when Big Jack has a talk with Cecil. Thirty-two years later, The Reverend Cecil Durgin is, himself, a pillar of the Three Breezes community. He is the owner of radio station WDAB, and has his own show preaching "common-sense scripture," playing Gospel music, imparting local news, and offering spiritual advice. He has become a spokesperson for the black community, and politically, he can deliver the vote. Thus he bargains with those he detests to do what is best for the town's people. He still harbors dark secrets, however, and the resulting neuroses, brought on by his painful childhood, threaten his relatively solid marriage to a woman who loves him and shares his burden. Cecil occasionally drives through McCormick's woods to visit a place haunted by memories of a women long dead, and to think about the guilt he feels for endangering his marriage. An important election is coming up, one which could significantly impact the ever accumulating wealth of the four remaining DoeRun lodge men. They see Cecil as a major threat to their plans, and although times have changed significantly since that November evening in 1958, they still have the Klan around to do their bidding. The fast paced, taut narrative moves toward a chilling conclusion, gathering momentum and building tension as it goes. Cecil is not the only one scarred by secrets, which are all about to come to light. Suzanne Hudson paints a dark and disturbing portrait of the south as it was, with its brutal enforcement of strict class and color lines. She vividly depicts the omnipo

WOW!!

This a great book. Ms. Hudson's writing is very aggressive and very hard to believe it comes from a female. Many of the same tones as A Time to Kill but with a must harder edge. It's not a PG13 book. It's a quick and great read. You will not be disappointed.

Hard Comedy, Harder Facts

Suzanne Hudson's recent novel, In a Temple of Trees, is knockout. Just how good a writer is Hudson? She turns a sexual encounter between a white male abductor and his black female abductee into twenty-three of the funniest pages you'll ever read. Brothers and sisters, if that doesn't take writing skill, then my childhood cracker name wasn't Billy Joe. Those two themes, racism and sexism, predominate the remainder of the novel in a much more serious manner, however. When the Klan appears days after a young black boy named Cecil, witnesses a murder at a white hunting camp, the novel turns as haunted as it was comic. Cecil is sexually debased before the Klan, as is his adopted white Jewish mother. Her reaction? "It was then that she let the fire have her, curling into the bowels of it as if it were some glowing embryonic membrane silencing the world." Set on the Alabama-Mississippi border, the novel's spine revolves around Cecil's reaction, his enduring memory of the rape-murder at the camp. When he witnessed it, he was an apprentice cook for five white men. The men have brought a young woman from over the state line to "entertain" them for the night. When matters turn nasty, young Cecil, who's been befriended by the woman earlier that day, is at a loss to help her. -Guilt over his lack of any helpful reaction haunts Cecil for thirty-two years. Here the plot thickens, for Cecil's inherited a radio station from his adopted white parents (one a Jew, remember, so an outcast in her own manner). And-this should sound familiar to Alabamians-a statewide voter referendum on charging timber companies realistic taxes is forthcoming. Cecil's radio station reaches several pivotal counties where the black vote could swing matters. So . . . Hudson is a master of intertwining suspense, tone, and scenes into a plot that will keep you reading throughout the night. And her characters are so real that you might want to sit with a canister of mace to keep some of them at bay.

A Triple Shot of Justice, Faith, and Violence - Incredible!

There are about a dozen books out there that I wish I had written. The Stranger by Albert Camus, William Gay's The Long Home, Larry Brown's Facing the Music, Tom Franklin's Poachers, among others. All of Cormac McCarthy's alien fiction-alien in that a flesh and bone man could not have written it. Flannery O'Connor, Lewis Nordan, Katherine Anne Porter, Tobias Wolff, Rick Bragg, Harry Crews, Raymond Carver, Tim Gautreaux, are other writers that I envy. I wish I had been the person writing the first draft of a number of good books.But now I have one more author, one more prose artist to wish I had breathed her words into being. Before her, the words were not. Because of her, the words are. That simple. That amazing. In a Temple of Trees is one of the kindest and harshest of novels I've ever read. It is a triple shot of justice, faith, and violence. Its pages shook me when I read them. What bothers me the most-and I have a feeling that you will hear more about this-is that an awful lot of the story is utterly true to actual events, the murder of a young mother of a brood of kids.Incredible reading. I highly recommend this novel and Suzanne Hudson's other work, Opposable Thumbs, as well.---------Reviewed by Dayne Sherman

Alll Southerners Should Read...

Reading Suzanne Hudson's work makes you want to be an author yourself. Here she tells a story that is so much more than a "page turner". You really care about her unique characters.