The Serpent King

The Serpent King is a young adult novel by American musician and novelist Jeff Zentner, originally published in the U.S. in 2016. This coming-of-age story about three youths growing up in a small town of Forrestville, Tennessee, explores individual, family, and social identity, along with love, loss, and religion. The novel won an American Library Association William C. Morris Award for Young Adult Literature, an International Literacy Association Young Adult Book Award, and it was a New York Times Notable Children’s Book. 

Jeff Zentner lives in Nashville and has published three novels, translated into 15 languages. He is also a successful rock and country guitarist and songwriter, with five albums to his name and many collaborations with rock legends, like Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry. The edition of the novel used for this study guide is by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, New York, published in 2016 in e-book format.

Plot Summary

Dillard Early Jr., Lydia Blankenship, and Travis Bohannon are close friends living in the small town of Forrestville, Tennessee, named after the founder of Ku Klux Klan. They are the unpopular kids: Dill’s father was a pastor for the Church of Christ’s Disciples with Signs of Belief, a charismatic church known for handling snakes, drinking poison, and speaking in tongues, until he was imprisoned for possession of child pornography.