The Serpent and the Spirit: Glenn Summerford’s Story. By Thomas Burton. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. 262 pages. $1995 paper. Thomas Burton has masterfully created not exactly a follow-up to his authoritative, scholarly history, Serpent-Handling Believers (University of Tennessee Press, 1993), but a companion work that details the sometimes bizarre, muchpublicized trial of Glenn Summerford in Scottsboro, Alabama. He has excised the journalistic hype surrounding the events of 1992 and tried to re-create the “reality” of the situation—if that can be done at all. The tale unravels beginning with a series of documents abstracted from court records and continues using interviews that the author taped and then transcribed carefully in the north Alabama dialect spoken by Summerford’s friends, acquaintances, and family who were involved more or less directly in the drama. Summerford, a “Holiness serpenthandling preacher,” was accused by his wife, Darlene, in 1991 of trying to kill her at home by forcing her hand into a box of poisonous snakes. She was bitten and hospitalized. Subsequently he was charged with attempted murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison. The mystery deepens, as the monologues reveal, when it turns out that there were serious discrepancies in the versions of what did or could have happened—there were no witnesses to the actual event—and who was really at fault. Some even believe that Glenn’s wife had cooked up a complicated plot to frame her husband because she had “gone back on God” and was tired of living the straight life of a preacher’s wife. Most of the folks involved, including Summerford, have chiaroscuro backgrounds and a variety of motives for their perceptions, including the agents of the Jackson County legal system who some think trumped the whole thing up to rid the community of the “snake handlers.” The story has it all: treacherous relationships, violence, marital infidelity, families in chaos, political skullduggery, drug and alcohol abuse, and what is seen by many as a uniquely Southern phenomenon— belief among some Christians that serpent handling is an acceptable, even necessary, manifestation of their relationship with God. Burton advises readers that the narrative technique was partly inspired by Robert Browning’s Renaissance murder mystery The Ring and the Book. The black and white photos throughout are perhaps an ironic choice to embellish a tale that is anything but black and white. There is a utilitarian, though not exhaustive, index that assists the book as a text or research tool. Nobody will ever know what really happened or what the “whole truth” of the matter was, but maybe that is the point. The Serpent and the Spirit masterfully reveals the infinite complexities of the author’s Jackson subjects, and it succeeds in an objective, highly readable format. The old shaman in Steven Vincent Benet’s story “By the Waters of Babylon” warns his son: “The truth is a hard deer to hunt.” MICHAEL DAVENPORT