In "The Last Gentleman" (1966), Will Barrett was 25 and suffered from attacks of amnesia. Now in "The Second Coming"—his reappearance is one of the meanings of the title—he is near 50 and suffers from attacks of memory. Something is certainly wrong: he is also prone to fall down and black out momentarily. But most chilling are those instants … when every detail of a past time comes flooding back upon him. One such memory returns in installments throughout the first half of the novel, until finally Will has confronted and solved a mystery of his youth: what really happened the day when, hunting together in a pin-oak swamp in Georgia, his father attempted suicide with a hunting rifle, and Will, too, was wounded.

The swamp memory is a bit of dark, woozy, Faulknerian melodrama, a tale of the Old South smuggled into what is in every other way a...