Come in at the Door

William March's debut novel, Company K, introduced him 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 in Marchs Pearl County collection, and it tells the story of Chester, a boy who lives with his withholding, widowed father, and Mitty, who keeps house and serves as a surrogate wife to Chesters father and a mother to Chester. One morning before dawn, Mitty takes Chester to the Athlestan courthouse to watch the hanging of a man whod killed a grotesque, dwarflike creature he thought had laid a conjure on him. Throughout Chesters rambunctious young manhood, the gruesome memory hovers just below the surface of his mind, recalled in detail only at his fathers death, when the book sweeps forward to its shattering denouement. A classic of Southern Gothic that illuminates family, class, race, and gender, Come in at the Door marks the homecoming of a Southern storyteller at the peak of his craft.