William March's debut novel, Company K, introduced him to the reading public as a gifted writer of modern fiction. Of that World War I classic, Graham Greene wrote: “It is the only war book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes.” After Company K, March brought his same unerring style to a cycle of novels and short stories—his “Pearl County” series—inspired in part by his childhood in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama.

Come in at the Door is the first in March’s “Pearl County” collection, and it tells the story of Chester, a boy who lives with his withholding, widowed father, and Mitty, who keeps house and serves as a surrogate wife to Chester’s father and a mother to Chester. One morning before dawn, Mitty takes Chester to the Athlestan courthouse to watch the hanging of a man who’d killed “a grotesque, dwarflike creature” he thought had “laid a conjure” on him.
 
Throughout Chester’s rambunctious young manhood, the gruesome memory hovers just below the surface of his mind, recalled in detail only at his father’s death, when the book sweeps forward to its shattering denouement. A classic of Southern Gothic that illuminates family, class, race, and gender, Come in at the Door marks the homecoming of a Southern storyteller at the peak of his craft.

William March was born in 1893 as William Edward Campbell in Mobile, Alabama, and grew up in the picturesque hamlets of coastal Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. He won fame for his World War I novel Company K, whose success allowed him to devote himself to writing a large body of remarkable short fiction and novels that illuminate early twentieth-century southern life. 

“Come in at the Door is a novel of exceptional interest; the first hundred pages, had they been published separately as a long short story, could have ranked with the best stories of childhood in English.”
—Graham Greene, Spectator

“William March is one of the world’s classic modern writers, a whole ionosphere above Faulkner, and the unrecognized genius of our time.”
—Alistair Cooke, A William March Omnibus

“The outstanding virtues of March’s work are those of complete lack of sentimentality and routine romanticism, of a dramatic gift constantly heightened and sharpened by eloquence of understatement.”
—New York Times