Where Trouble Sleeps was published by Algonquin Books in 1997. The novel is set in Listre, North Carolina, in 1950 — the same fictional town as Raney, now seen a generation earlier. Stephen, a five-year-old boy, observes the arrival of Jack Umstead, a charming drifter who takes a room at the local tourist home and begins insinuating himself into the community. The adults sense something wrong but cannot articulate it; Stephen, who understands even less but sees more, records the disruption with the literal-minded precision of a child.
Edgerton’s decision to filter the story through a child’s perspective is the novel’s most daring choice. Stephen does not understand the adult anxieties his observations trigger — the sexual tension, the economic precariousness, the racial hierarchies — but he records them faithfully, and the reader supplies the interpretation. The effect is both comic (Stephen’s misreadings are often funny) and unsettling (the reader sees the danger that Stephen cannot).
The town itself is Edgerton’s most fully realized community: the general store, the church, the bootlegger’s shed, the train trestle where boys play, the houses where women visit each other and exchange information that they pretend is not gossip. Edgerton renders 1950s small-town Southern life with the affectionate precision of someone who grew up in it and understands both its warmth and its limitations.
Collecting Where Trouble Sleeps
First edition (Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, 1997): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12