How Sleeps the Beast

How Sleeps the Beast is a mixed bag, to put it mildly. It's the story of an ugly, ugly lynching in a rural Maryland town, taken part in by a very large, rabid, hate-filled mob, with the lynching itself, far from a "simple" hanging, and exceedingly cruel and brutal affair. All this is true to the actual events of many, many lynchings, in which Blacks were not just hung, but disemboweled and sometimes burned alive. So as far as that goes, while the book is hard to read, it's a valuable historical testimony. However, three major flaws are also evident. The first is that the Blacks of this town are often (not always) portrayed as the simplistic, child-like folk of the worst racist tropes. Second, and even worse, is that the victim, in the show more event, is actually guilty of the crime he's accused of, and again via an even more vile racist stereotype, having gotten drunk and in his inebriated haze decided to go off in search of a white woman. Any white woman. When, in reality, Blacks in the Jim Crow South got lynched for protesting about being cheated out of payment for the crops they'd grown, or making their houses look too attractive, or having money in the bank: anything that made them appear to be rising "above their station." So suggesting that a Black person had to be guilty of an actual crime in order to be lynched in fact borders on doing more harm than good in terms of the message taken away by the reader, no matter how deprived the perpetrators of the lynching are portrayed as being. The third, and least objectionable in the long run, flaw is that the characters are essentially all cardboard cutouts, put in place to espouse this point of view or that one, whether evil or well intentioned, strong or weak, cynical or idealistic.

So, despite the book being intriguing at the outset, and a good fictional portrayal of the horrors of racial hatred and the depravity of lynch mobs, in the end it falls short for me of being anything ultimately but an historical curiosity. show less