Hell of a Book

Hell of a Book engages with the long history of anti-Black racial violence in the United States. Published in 2021, the novel responds to the political unrest surrounding the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota by a police officer. During this period, there was a resurgence in public outrage toward police brutality. Police brutality refers to human rights violations undertaken by members of the police force; in the context of renewed public attention in 2020 in the United States, it is often applied to racially motivated excessive police force. It is also especially associated with such violence against Black people.

Many details in the text draw directly from real social movements and rhetoric around the issue of a racial justice. For instance, Chapter 6 features a passing protest where participants show banners stating, “Black Lives Matter,” a common refrain and the name of a contemporary movement against racial inequality. Protesters in Chapter 6 also show posters with names of real Black people who have been murdered in incidents of police brutality, including Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Philando Castile (73). These figures (among others) experienced a kind of viral awareness in the wake of their deaths, a virality that Hell of a Book comments on, for example through Sharon reading the news about the incident of a murder on her cell phone in Chapter 8. 

Anti-Black violence is a central theme in Hell of the Book. Soot’s side of the narrative is molded by his father William, who is shot and killed by a police officer. Soot later meets the same fate on a late-night walk. In the unnamed first-person narrator’s side of the narrative, characters are constantly mentioning the recent incident of a boy’s murder, and this boy turns out to be Soot.

While Hell of a Book deals with the trauma, virality, and political repercussions of contemporary police brutality, it also engages with the longer history of racial violence against Black people in the United States. In the same protest from Chapter 6, protesters also mention Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy brutally murdered by two white men in 1955. Mott includes Till to make the argument that modern day incidents of racial inequality are not singular but part of a legacy of racial violence in the United States. Mott drives home this point further in the novel’s references to slavery. For instance, in Chapter 24, the unnamed narrator asserts that the past matters as context for the present; in that moment, enslaved Black people from the past begin appearing in the field in front of him. This sentiment reappears in Chapter 29, when he refers to “the history of slavery that led” (310) to Soot hating his black skin, facing discrimination, and ultimately being murdered. In this way, Hell of a Book engages with centuries of anti-Black racial violence in the United States.