cover image The Fennel Family Papers

The Fennel Family Papers

William Baldwin. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $19.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-56512-069-3

Like Baldwin's acclaimed first novel, The Hard to Catch Mercy, which won the Lillian Smith Award for Fiction, his second is set in a South Carolina coastal town and sends up Southern Gothic. What's new here is a wickedly funny academic satire, grafted onto a manic plot featuring murder, madness, incest, a ghost and spirit possession. Ambitious, reclusive history professor Paul Danvers, desperate to achieve tenure, starts an affair with his student, Ginny Fennel, in order to gain access to the private papers of her notorious family, lighthouse keepers since the American Revolution, whose ancestors include slave dealers, black marketers and adventurers. As Paul sifts the Fennel archives--and as he fends off Ginny's uncle, homicidal maniac Leroy Ramona, who has incestuous designs on his niece--the self-centered professor stumbles upon family skeletons. Did Ginny's wheelchair-bound father become paralyzed by falling off a porch or by jumping from a lighthouse--or was he trying to fly, caught in a voodoo spell cast by the Fennels' Gullah-speaking black servant? Was lighthouse keeper Captain Jack Fennel, Ginny's great-grandfather, a Civil War hero or a murderously indifferent cook? As this gripping, macabre, witty romp progresses, and as deranged Ginny slips into the personality of her great-grand-aunt and thinks it's 1861, Paul seems ever more likely to perish than to publish. (Feb.)