Billie James was just a toddler when her father died. Cliff James, a black poet who made a name for himself in Harlem during the civil rights era, had returned to his family home in Mississippi, where he died of an apparent accident. Billie was visiting him the night he died, but has no recollection of the events. Her mother, divorced from Cliff, flew to Mississippi and took Billie away before Cliff's family could arrange a funeral for him. Now, 30 years later, her mother has died, and Billie is returning to Mississippi, where she's inherited her father's house, and all the ghosts that come with it.
In her debut novel, The Gone Dead, Chanelle Benz constructs a rich sense of place that contributes to the sinister atmosphere. The history of Mississippi and the South provide ample context, and Benz takes her readers on an emotional exploration of the darkness that continues to haunt the nation as her protagonist tries to reconstruct the missing memories from her childhood. In one scene, Billie visits an old juke joint Cliff frequented, the subject of one of his poems. Shuttered long ago, the Avalon speaks volumes through its dilapidated condition and eerie silence as Billie "walks up to a broken bottle tree guarding the scarred patchwork of wood and tin. Bottle trees are meant to trap bad spirits, but it looks like these ones got out."
Benz gives the setting further importance by handing the narration over to the ramshackle building in the following chapter, "This house was once a house. Seen a girl made a mother, a boy become a father who come and go, come and go.... Heard the knock of white men looking for a boy hiding at his uncle's house, heard shots in the night, far off but always too close, and heard weeping, too much weeping too damn much of the time." Setting literally becomes character.
While Billie searches for a connection to her father, she discovers that her grandmother reported her missing immediately after his death. Having no recollection of this, Billie starts asking questions and poking around in things the locals would prefer to keep firmly in the past. She engages the help of a scholar working on a biography of her father, and together they go in search of the facts surrounding the end of Cliff James's life, which could very well result in the end of theirs.
With a cast of supporting characters as beaten down by life as the town they live in, The Gone Dead explores the complicated relationships between races in the Deep South. Benz lifts the curtain of social acceptability to reveal the harsh truths of racism as Billie struggles to find justice for the father she barely knew. Haunting and atmospheric, The Gone Dead is a gripping mystery and a rich family drama--irresistible Southern fiction. --Jen Forbus
Shelf Talker: When a young woman returns to her father's Mississippi home 30 years after his death, she finds more than a crumbling old cabin--and her discoveries could be deadly.