Allen Mendenhall

Lawyer and university administrator at Troy University, Allen Mendenhall, visits Writer’s Voices to discuss his debut novel, A Glooming Peace This Morning. Categorized as Southern Gothic, the story is set in the 1970’s in the fictional town of Andalusia in fictious Magnolia County. Mendenhall explains, “It’s really a retelling of Greek tragedy and more specifically, the drama between the characters Tommy and Sarah is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. The title, A Glooming Peace This Morning is a phrase directly from Romeo and Juliet.” Inspired by a real-life case that Mendenhall came across in law school, “The story is… a coming-of-age novel and the narrator is Cephas and he retells this story of this forbidden love between Tommy and Sarah, and Tommy is intellectually disabled… and Sarah is the darling of society… and she comes down with a mysterious illness and she and Tommy have an illicit relationship… and that’s what gets them in trouble with the law. There is a prosecution… there is a trial, much like To Kill a Mockingbird… the story is set against the backdrop of this trial. The trial is really what drives the conclusion… and that trial is very southern in many ways and it does, of course, lead to tragedy.” In the novel, Tommy is 18 and Sarah is 13, and while Tommy is considered intellectually disabled, his relationship with Sarah does implicate statutory rape laws. Mendenhall says, “…statutory rape is, of course, a strict liability offense, meaning that people can be convicted of it regardless of the mens rea element… It doesn’t matter what Tommy was or wasn’t able to do, the question turns on whether he, in fact, did it or not… and if the facts are sufficient to convince a jury of guilt, then the character is going to be convicted. Tommy is going to be convicted.”

Throughout the book, readers can feel a sense of melancholy as they navigate through Tommy and Sarah’s relationship and then through the trial. Even the title itself, A Glooming Peace This Morning, evokes sorrow and desolation. Mendenhall reflects, “I think people struggle with loneliness and sadness, but I don’t think those are necessarily bad things. I actually think the ideal state for a human being is melancholy because happiness can lead you to be delusional… I really dislike how our culture is always chasing after happiness, happiness, happiness because happiness is not a constant… You can’t be happy all the time. If you were, there would be no such thing as happiness. There can be no happiness without sadness… I think that our culture is so obsessed with happiness without saying, ‘You know what? Sadness is ok. It is not just ok, but it’s good.'”