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. Lydia is a popular blogger (for readers outside of her hometown) and a fashionable young woman with plans of making it big in New York. Travis, who works in his father’s lumberyard, is tall and strong, but gentle and romantic. 

As they start their senior year of high school, each is preoccupied with their own set of troubles. Dill, a talented songwriter, struggles to make peace with his family’s past of madness, religious fanaticism, and crime. He works in a grocery store to help ends meet, never daring to dream of going away to college. Having romantic feelings for Lydia only complicates things further. After the death of his older brother in Afghanistan, Travis lives in a world of fantasy, similar to heroic books he reads, in order to cope with an abusive and alcoholic father. In an online forum about fantasy books, he meets Amelia and they start a romantic correspondence. 

Meanwhile, Lydia tries to balance her image as a social media maven with the reality of her small-town life and her own feelings for Dill. Through all this, the three friends support each other. Over the course of the school year, Lydia persuades Dill to record his music, and he soon becomes an internet sensation, which reawakens his dreams of college. She also arranges for Travis to meet the author of his favorite fantasy book series, Bloodfall; during the meeting, Travis misses his father’s calls, and then he and his father have a fight. Travis leaves home and crashes at Dill’s, and they plan a future in which they will share a house. 

Soon after, Lydia informs Dill that NYU accepted her. Travis, while selling firewood by the river to earn money to buy a laptop, is attacked and shot by two drug addicts. Travis’s death profoundly changes Dill and Lydia, and as they grieve, Dill slides into deep depression, which leads him to the brink of suicide. With Lydia’s support, he finds the strength to seek a different life, and he and Lydia start a romantic relationship. Against his parents’ wishes and with Lydia’s help, he applies for college and is accepted, thanks to his music. 

At the end of the school year, after they make fun of the prom night with their own version of “pathetic prom,” Lydia leaves for New York, and Dill visits his father in prison for the last time. Dill sells one of his songs to a pop star, and Lydia begins expanding her blog as they both look forward to a different and better future.