“HOW FIRE RUNS” by Charles Dodd White (Swallow Press, 272 pages, $23).
In the opening pages of Knoxville writer Charles Dodd White’s “How Fire Runs,” a group of white supremacists establish themselves on the grounds of an abandoned mental hospital. From here, on wooded outskirts of a carefully selected town in East Tennessee, their leader intends to rebrand the movement by offering the locals some kinder, gentler Nazis – cool-headed, civically useful, rhetorically skillful. They call their new stronghold “Little Europe.”
Unlike many of the people he has recruited, the group’s founder, Gavin Noon, is a true believer. Surrounding himself with a library of books about fascism and eugenics, Noon has developed a multi-stage plan to infiltrate the local government and beyond. But the first step is to present his group as just another innocuous local organization: “The one thing that could undermine his efforts was haste. Instead, he must remain deliberate, measured. He must not allow others to make him the caricature they would have preferred him to be.”
Noon and his followers have been groomed through various channels to join the sub-world of white nationalism – prison gangs, online message boards, fan fiction and familial cycles of abuse. The insidious nature of contemporary white supremacist recruiting tactics is revealed in the experience of Harrison, a vulnerable young man whose pragmatic alignment with the Aryan Brotherhood during a prison term becomes the bridge he takes back into the outside. The sheer darkness that’s surrounded him for years has led him to understand a warped sense of belonging, a “belonging that demanded you reject the rest of the world.”
Leading the fight against the threat of this influence are two county commissioners who are already fighting demons of their own. Kyle Pettus is a former Marine who operates a plant nursery and a reforestation program that helps fellow veterans. An engaging character with a strong civic responsibility and a secretive personal life, Kyle finds himself suddenly responsible for the safety of Gerald Pickens, an ornery Vietnam vet who is the only other Democrat on the county commission.