Killer Diller was published by Algonquin Books in 1991 as a sequel to Walking Across Egypt. Wesley Benfield, now in his early twenties, is living in a halfway house called BOTA (Back on Track Again) run by a Baptist university. He has formed a blues band — the Killer Dillers — with Vernon Jackson, a paraplegic wheelchair-bound fundamentalist who plays a mean guitar. Wesley is also falling in love with Phoebe Trent, a student at the university who has been so sheltered by her religious upbringing that Wesley’s world — cars, bars, petty crime — is as foreign to her as Martian culture.
The novel is structured around the tension between Wesley’s genuine desire to reform and the magnetic pull of his old habits. He is smart enough to see that the blues are his path forward — the music gives him a discipline and an emotional outlet that nothing else in his life has provided — but he is also young enough to make catastrophic mistakes. The university administration, meanwhile, is more interested in controlling Wesley than in helping him, and the conflict between institutional Christianity and the messy reality of human fallibility provides the novel’s satirical edge.
Edgerton’s ear for dialogue remains flawless, and the musical scenes — rehearsals, jam sessions, a climactic performance — are written with the authority of someone who understands that playing in a band is simultaneously a creative act and a social negotiation.
Collecting Killer Diller
First edition (Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, 1991): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15