59 pages • 1 hour read
Jeff ZentnerThe Serpent King
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-6
Chapter 1 Summary: “Dill”
Dillard Wayne Early Jr. starts his senior year of high school tomorrow, in Forrestville, Tennessee. His father, Dillard Sr., was once the pastor of a “Church of Christ’s Disciples with Signs of Belief” (6), where congregants handled rattlesnakes and drank diluted battery acid and strychnine. He is now in Riverbend Prison in Nashville for “possession of more than 100 images depicting a minor engaged in sexual activity” (6). Dill’s mother works as a motel maid.
Dill writes songs and plays the guitar, and he is secretly in love with his best friend Lydia Blankenship, a fashion blogger with big dreams of a successful career. Today, she drives him to Nashville to help him buy clothes for the new school year.
They pick up Travis Bohannon, whose father owns a lumberyard. Travis— tall, bulky, and dressed all in black—is a fan of a fantasy book series called Bloodfall. He carries an “oaken staff,” which he carved.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Lydia”
Lydia feels happy about starting her senior year. She also has feelings for Dill, but she refuses to explore them. She brings Dill and Travis to a vintage clothes shop that “smelled of old leather, wool, and denim” (13). She makes a great connection with the owner, April. Although the bill for the clothes they choose comes up to $120, Lydia makes a deal with April: She will feature April’s shop on her influential blog, Dollywould, and on social media in exchange for a large discount for Dill.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Dill”
Dill decides, against his better judgment, to visit his father on the way back from Nashville. Dillard Sr. is a hard and cunning but charismatic man. He has new tattoos, including “Mark 16:18”: “I wear my faith on my skin. They can’t take that from me” (23).
Dillard Sr. wants Dill to spend his time in school being “a soldier for Christ” (24). He asks Dill to sing some of the gospel music that Dill composed. Dill feels uncomfortable, but Father makes him sing one of his Christian-themed songs anyway.
On the way home, Dill feels depressed, knowing this is the final year he will spend with Lydia. He tries to persuade her to go sit in the park, but she needs to write her blog, and she reacts angrily to his passive-aggressive behavior. They make up, and she gives him a CD with music and as she leaves. He decides there is “no use sitting in a gloomy house” (31), so he sits on the steps.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Travis”
Travis imagines himself a hero of the Bloodfall novels. His father treats him with scorn, comparing him with his brother Matt, who died in Afghanistan. He reminds Travis of an incident from last year when a Latino boy, Alex Jimenez, was picking on Dill, and Travis threw him so hard the boy cracked his head on the table in the cafeteria. Instead of acting like a fighter, Travis “ran his fingers through his hair, sobbing and telling anyone who would listen that he was sorry” (34).
Video of the incident leaked, and Travis became a laughingstock, but his father only knows that “his son had kicked some Mexican ass” (35), and he feels proud of Travis. He wants him to enlist in the army like his brother, although Travis plans to work in his father’s lumberyard. His father tells him a story about a big turkey swimming with ducks, concluding Travis is “that big-ass turkey, thinking he’s a duck” (37).
In his room, Travis joins the Bloodfall forum, where he shyly chats with a girl whose handle is “autumnlands.” His mother enters his room with a gift of another romance fantasy novel that she mistakenly believes he likes. He exchanges names with the girl, called Amelia.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Dill”
Dill makes dinner from free produce he gets at the grocery store where he works. His exhausted mother arrives from work, suffering from back pain because she does not have money to refill her prescription. As they eat, she chastises Dill for not having more friends from the church. Dill tells her about the prison visit and she says, “I haven’t understood everything your father’s done, but I trust that God’s willed it” (45). She also tells him she would rather he left school to find a full-time job, and when Dill reacts with incredulity, she warns him, “Someday you’ll learn that you’re no better than your own name.” (46).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Lydia”
Lydia’s parents have a present for her: “a brand-new Mac laptop, wrapped up with a red bow” (50). Upstairs, Lydia has three rooms for herself. She messages her “best internet friend” (50), Dahlia Winter, daughter of Vivian Winter, editor-in-chief of Chic Magazine. They plan to share a flat in New York if they get into NYU. Lydia ponders the fact that Travis and Dill are not cool enough to post on social media: Travis is “hopelessly off-brand, and he couldn’t care less”; Dill looks like a model but “his name was the problem” (52), as everyone would know whose son he is.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
Although Zentner structures the novel around the three protagonists, Dill, Lydia, and Travis, it is clear from the pattern of alternating perspectives in every chapter that Dill’s will be the main point of view presented. Dill’s point of view covers 27 chapters, Lydia’s 19, and Travis’s 7, positioning Dill’s character firmly as the main viewpoint in the novel. In addition, the title of the book references his family and the dark legacy that he carries as a psychological burden.
The author, however, gives all three characters a distinct point of view; the book is written in third person, but every chapter is told from the perspective of the character whose name becomes the chapter title. This structure helps Zentner create three well-rounded, fully fleshed-out characters and illuminates how they function both on their own and as part of a trio of friends.
Chapter 1 reveals pertinent facts about Dill and his unorthodox family. His father, now in prison for possession of child pornography, used to be a pastor of a Pentecostal-style church. Pentecostalism is a Protestant Christian movement that rejects the teachings of the Catholic church, including papal supremacy and the necessity of holy sacraments. Pentecostals believe in biblical inerrancy— the Bible cannot be wrong on any point—and that baptism in the Holy Spirit enables one to both know God’s presence and receive spiritual gifts, like speaking in tongues, handling snakes, drinking poison without injury, and divine healing. The church is evangelical, believing that people are “born again” and admitted into heaven following a profession of faith and baptism. Evangelical churches believe in achieving salvation through God’s grace alone—salvation cannot be earned through good deeds—and by accepting the gift of redemption through Jesus’s death and resurrection.
The religious beliefs described in the novel, which takes place in Tennessee, are prominent in a region in Southeast United States often nicknamed “the Bible Belt.” Tennessee is home to more evangelicals per capita than any state in the U.S. The name “Forrestville,” after Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, cements the setting as an emulsion of fundamentalism, radicalism, and even white nationalism. Within this oppressive, tight-knit, and undercultured environment, the three protagonists struggle to form independent identities. Dill, Lydia, and Travis do not fit the mold, and they have found a way to form a surrogate family of their own to cope with being alienated, teased, and bullied.
The combination of Dill’s creativity, Lydia’s intelligence, and Travis’s sensitivity helps their trio form almost a single personality. Many teenagers form such social groups during these turbulent years, when belonging is of vital importance. Although the friends are outliers in their community, the bonds between them are strong. Dill is reluctant to admit his feelings toward Lydia because he instinctively fears this would jeopardize their friendship. Lydia, on the other hand, refuses to engage with her own feelings toward Dill because she believes their paths will soon diverge.
Chapter 2, told from Lydia’s perspective, highlights both how focused she is on making her way out of the small town and her admirable dedication to her blog. Travis, in Chapter 4, finds solace from the harsh reality of his abusive home life by imagining his life and everyday activities through the lens of a hero from his favorite epic fantasy series, Bloodfall. By opening Travis’s chapters with italicized “excerpts” from the book in which Travis imagines himself, the author indicates just how strongly Travis needs to dissociate from reality. He mourns his dead brother, and although he feels love and support from his mother, he cannot find common ground with his insensitive, alcoholic father.
Also in Chapter 2, Dill visits his father in prison and notes that his father has changed for the worse. A hard and cold man, Dillard Sr. has figured out how to thrive in prison. Dill perceives his new tattoos, including one that says Mark 16:18: “They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” Dill’s father still envisions himself as a church leader, and even his crimes and his jail sentence cannot dissuade him; his conviction about his own version of reality makes him a formidable figure in Dill’s life. Dill feels fear and revulsion toward his father, but also a sense of awe, and a big part of his character’s journey will be to learn how to see his father for who he really is: a desperate, half-crazed, incarcerated, weak man. One of Dill’s unwitting antagonists will be his mother, who clings to the image of her husband as a man of God, despite all evidence to the contrary. Dill’s ideas about his future, including the remote possibility of going to college, are not something she wishes to entertain.
Whereas Dill and Travis live in near poverty and have parents unable or unwilling to offer them support, Lydia’s parents both work professional jobs (her father is a dentist), and the author portrays them as supportive, caring, and easygoing, maintaining a good rapport with Lydia. Their support makes it hard for Lydia to appreciate fully her own good fortune in contrast with the difficult situation of her friends, and it will be part of her character’s journey to learn humility and empathy for those who have less.
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