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 22-30
Chapter 22 Summary: “Lydia”
Dill has recorded five of his songs on his new laptop, and he asks Lydia to post them on YouTube. When she listens to the songs, she finds them “mesmerizing. Haunting. Soaring”; in the videos, Dill possesses “a dark charisma” like his father’s (188). She asks her mother if Mrs. Blankenship ever developed romantic feelings for a friend, and her mother reveals that Lydia’s dad was a friend who became something more.
Lydia persuades Dill to enter the Forrestville High School talent competition by showing him that his videos, under the handle “Dearly,” have almost 10,000 views on YouTube already.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Dill”
Dill finds focus in practicing for the show. As he stands before the audience, he briefly fantasizes being 13 and in front of the church with the guitar. This time, his father passes him the snake, smiling, and he accepts it. In the show, he performs “like the Holy Spirit had descended on him with a cleansing fire” (196). The students barely react, but the judges pronounce him the winner. He wins $50. A popular girl approaches him to congratulate him, and the guidance counselor tells him he has a future in music.
The following week, he drives with Lydia’s dad to Nashville to visit his father. Before the trip, he gets into a fight with his mother, who believes it is his fault his father is in jail, telling him: “You could’ve testified it was yours” (201). She adds, “So you ask me, between you and your father, who I think Lucifer ensnared?” (202). Dill breaks down and cries.
His father has new tattoos of snakes. Dill asks him about college, and his father says that college will teach Dill that God is dead. Dill confronts Dill Sr. with his own weaknesses, but his father does not relent; after threatening Dill, he leaves the visiting room.
In the car on the way home, Dill breaks down in tears. Dr. Blankenship hugs him and supports him. As Dill mentions Lydia’s leaving for college, her dad cries too, and tells Dill he would be proud if Dill were his son.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Travis”
Lydia and Dill are taking Travis for a special trip to Nashville, to meet G. M. Pennington, the author of the Bloodfall series, whose real name is Gary Mark Kozlowski. He grew up in rural Kansas and used his imagination to escape. Lydia managed to contact him through Vivian Winter. Over ice cream, Gary urges Travis to try his hand at writing fantasy, telling him, “I sense something special in you. A great imagination” (221). He signs a book for Travis.
As Travis returns home, having forgotten to bring his cell phone, he finds his father drunk and in a foul mood because he had work for Travis and could not reach him. He attacks him, slapping him with his baseball cap, and then takes his book and rips pages from it. Travis “howled like a wounded animal and threw himself at his father’s back” (226). His father brings him down and starts to hit him with his belt. After Travis’s mom intervenes, Travis threatens his father and leaves the house forever.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Dill”
Travis finds Dill. As they sit in Bertram Park, he tells Dill about what has happened, and shares that “Gary made me believe in myself more tonight than my dad has in my whole life” (231). He suggests Dill and he should get a house together after graduation. Dill agrees and invites Travis to crash at his place.
Chapter 26 Summary: “Lydia”
Three weeks later, Travis shows up at Lydia’s with a story he has written, asking her to read it. Since he can no longer work at the lumberyard, he tells her he started selling firewood to make additional money for writing classes and a laptop. Dr. Blankenship buys half of his firewood.
Dahlia and Lydia receive letters from NYU, telling them they have been accepted.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Dill”
Lydia picks up Dill after his job to tell him the big news, to which he tries to react positively, although he feels terrible as he envisions Lydia in New York with some new young man she loves. As they talk, they hear sirens and see an ambulance pass by. Dill tells her of his plans with Travis.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Travis”
Travis sits by the river, selling firewood and texting Amelia. They agree when the new book in the Bloodfall series comes out, they will read it together. A car pulls up behind his pickup. Two strangers hold Travis up for money. As he reaches for his zipper pouch, one of the men shoots him in the chest. He dials 911 and manages to tell the operator he has been shot and where he is, all the time asking for his mom.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Dill”
Dill and Lydia go to find Travis to give him the news, since he is not answering his phone. When they reach the river, they “see a wall of flashing blue lights: Forrestville police, White County sheriff” (250). Lydia recognizes Travis’s truck, and they manage to persuade a police officer to tell them that the ambulance has taken Travis to County Hospital.
In the hospital, they see Travis’s parents in tears. Dill breaks down, “on the floor of White County Hospital, he screamed in some anguished and alien language of bereavement” (253). Later, as he arrives home, and tells his mom the news of Travis’s death, she asks him if Travis was saved, to which he replies, “He had his salvation” (253).
Chapter 30 Summary: “Lydia”
On the day of the funeral, Lydia informs Dill the police have caught the men who killed Travis—“two asshole idiot meth heads” (255)—and that they shot Travis because one of them saw Travis’s staff and thought it was a baseball bat. They took only $123 off him. Lydia and Dill are shellshocked and grieving.
At the funeral home, they meet Amelia, who is also in tears, and they share their thoughts on Travis. Dill is angry that many classmates have come to the funeral, although they never cared about Travis. As they visit Travis, laid out in his coffin, Lydia puts something into his suit jacket. She notices “a particularly elaborate and beautiful flower arrangement” (260), sent by Gary Kozlowski with a touching message of farewell.
Chapters 22-30 Analysis
Chapter 22 represents one of the major turning points in the novel: the first time Lydia watches Dill perform. His performance reveals a completely new side of him that she only instinctively guessed existed. For the first time, Lydia verbalizes to her mother the idea that she has been fighting: Maybe a friend can become a romantic love interest. In an example of parallelism, her mother reveals that her parents were first friends before becoming lifelong partners. This information allows Lydia to open herself to the possibility of connecting romantically with Dill, even though her biggest fear is that she will have to leave Dill behind when she departs for New York.
Additionally, for Dill, the reactions from people on YouTube are the first indication that his talent might be genuine and that he has something to offer the world. This realization motivates him to start changing his life. In a display of growing maturity, he accepts Lydia’s suggestion to compete in the school’s talent show, his first non-church-related musical appearance. The performance shows that Dill is coming into his own personality, independent from his family’s history. Still, as he stands in front of the auditorium, he has a brief vision of a previous memory, when his father derisively refused to let him handle a snake; this time he accepts the snake from him. The vision shows that regardless of his new independence deep inside, Dill still yearns for acceptance from his father. Even as Dill finds the strength and courage to overcome traumatic events from his past, he remains connected to key people, like his parents, although they might not have been supportive or loving.
Dill faces an attack from the person he least expects to betray him: his mother. She tells Dill, “you deserve to feel uncomfortable seeing as how you put him there” (200), openly accusing Dill, for the first time, of being responsible for his father’s prison sentence. When Dill retorts, “I took an oath to tell the truth. I swore on the Bible to tell the truth. All I said was that it wasn’t mine. I didn’t say it was Dad’s. I didn’t testify against him. I testified for myself” (201), his mother refuses to look him in the eye, but Dill understands that she would rather believe the pornography was his and not his father’s.
Still enthralled with her husband, Dill’s mother rejects any reality that contradicts her belief in divine grace. Even though the author never depicts Dill’s parents in a scene together, except through flashback, their relationship excludes Dill as unworthy, and they are both prepared to use him to achieve their ends. Dill begins to realize that to survive, he will have to leave this toxic environment. This realization is further confirmed when Dill visits his father in prison, and, facing his accusations of weakness, he answers back for the first time, saying: “Your weak flesh. Yours. Not mine” (206). Even though this defiance costs Dill a lot emotionally—he breaks down in front of Dr. Blankenship on the way home—it’s a necessary step toward becoming an independent adult. In this scene, Dr. Blankenship again provides contrast to the character of Dill’s father, as he unconditionally supports Dill and tells him the truth, which Dill should have heard from his parents: “That’s not on you. That’s on him. And if he tries to put it on you, screw him” (211).
The climax of the novel, Travis’s sudden and violent death in Chapter 28, is made even more poignant by a glimpse into the life this young man could have led, when Lydia arranges for Travis to meet his literary hero, the author of the Bloodfall series. This technique creates an emotional connection to something to which readers can relate: the excitement of a young man meeting his idol, who gives him the respect and support he does not get from home. Zentner causes the reader to feel invested in a promising future for Travis, making the impact of his death much more effective in literary terms. Travis’s father, however, quickly undermines all the support Travis has received from the writer. The confrontation is terrifying and deeply disturbing, because nothing Travis does will ever be enough to earn the respect of his father. The symbolic moment of final rupture comes when Travis’s father rips the pages from the signed book Travis has received. For Travis, this action represents the point of no return, when he realizes he is ready to burn all his bridges with his father.
Again, this confrontation and Travis’s decision to leave provoke a strong emotional reaction, leading readers to believe that Travis will now be able to realize his dream of becoming roommates with Dill and writing a novel. In this context, the senseless, random nature of Travis’s death becomes overpoweringly sad. The author additionally juxtaposes the happy news of Lydia’s acceptance into NYU against the realization that something is terribly wrong, making the scene even more impactful. Travis’s death comes unexpectedly, and the shock, sadness, and disbelief provide additional motivation for Dill and Lydia. The grief they feel over the death of their dearest friend will help them become more capable of dealing with adult life, as they accept the changes that are about to happen.
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