Hell of a Book
A Black novelist on a book tour keeps seeing a Black child who may or may not exist. Mott weaves together the absurdity of literary celebrity and the very real nightmare of anti-Black violence with a structure that earns its emotional ambitions.
The narrator's noir-detective patter, calling women Doll Face and Toots, strikes a recurring complaint as a tic that doesn't earn its keep even after another character calls him out on it within the book itself. Momentum breaks in the second half, several readers say, as the sharp absurdism of the opening gives way to the book spelling out its own themes, and one reviewer calls a specific stretch “too broad and on the nose”. The ending draws the most direct frustration, described by one reader as “an awkward, muted thud” after all that buildup, and another admits by the close they were “desperate to be at the end” rather than absorbed in it. Some readers also say the comic, noir-inflected main story crowds out Soot's chapters, which a number of reviewers separately rate as the stronger, more affecting material.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
