Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 24, 1991                   TAG: 9103260005
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: B-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by GREG EDWARDS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WESLEY BENFIELD IS BACK IN `KILLER DILLER'

Clyde Edgerton's peculiar Southern characters sometimes have a Flannery O'Connor feel about them - but where something dark lurks below the surface in O'Connor's characters, Edgerton undercoats his with a lighter touch.

"Killer Diller" is a funny and entertaining satire. Edgerton does a nice job of taking you inside the minds of his characters.

Here again meet Wesley Benfield, who appeared last in Edgerton's "Walking Across Egypt." Wesley, an orphan and former lawbreaker, is being brought back into polite society and pursuing dreams of a musical career as a resident of a halfway house, BOTA House. BOTA is short for Back On Track Again.

BOTA house sits at the edge of the campus of Ballard University, a fundamental religious institution in the fictional North Carolina town of Summerlin. Wesley and other BOTA house residents, past and present, have hopes of hitting the big time with their blues band.

For the time being, because of their circumstances, Wesley and the band have to be content playing gospel. Wesley doesn't have any problem with that, having become a dedicated practitioner of the Christian religion under the tutelage of his elderly mentor, Mattie Rigsbee.

But, at 24, Wesley has other things on his mind besides music and spiritual matters. There's that need to find a beautiful woman to spend the rest of his life with, for instance.

And to his own surprise, he finds her in 230-pound Phoebe Trent, a resident of Nutrition House, Ballard University's Christian diet center. Phoebe, the daughter of Ballard's new dean, worries Wesley, putting thoughts in his head he doesn't believe are very Christian-like.

Trying to understand his warm feelings for Phoebe and reconcile them with his religion, Wesley discovers some things in the Bible - the Song of Solomon, among others - that Mattie Rigsbee never told him about. He wonders why Mattie didn't tell him about things such as Jesus hanging around with prostitutes and Jacob sleeping with his wife's maids and his sister-in-law.

Wesley loses a little more of his new-found innocence when he learns that Ted Sears, the public-relations-conscious president of Ballard, has taken an interest in Mattie only to get his hands on her money.

Jesus, Wesley discovers in the Bible, was a troublemaker just like himself. "I'm thinking about writing a song about Jesus," he tells Mattie.

And Wesley is in trouble again as we see him last, a runaway from BOTA House - on the road with the band.