Liquid Snakes

June 12, 2023
Kearse’s latest (after In the Heat of the Light) is a dazzling pharmacological thriller that dances on the knife’s edge of satire. The prologue sets the tone for the semi-speculative story to come, laying out the license agreement for a dangerous new app called EightBall in mind-numbing fine print. Nestled within are some strange and ominous warnings, however: “You do not need permission to be free, but you might need weapons.” At Atlanta’s Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy, high school student Valencia McCormick dies after ingesting a glowing black liquid, and Centers for Disease Control epidemiologists Ebonee McCollum and Retta Vickers are sent to determine if she is the latest victim of the city’s suicide epidemic. They discover that the deaths are linked to a complex project of extermination, developed by Black biochemist Kenny Bomar and capitalized on by his friend Thurgood Houser. Euphemistically called blackouts, the deaths are caused by a toxic chemical Bomar designed to allow Black people the chance to choose their own death as a stand against racial discrimination. Written with incisive wit and studded with references to Black popular culture (Retta’s college “foray into radicalism” included listening to musical group the Soulquarians) and troubling incidents from recent history, this entertains even as it deeply disturbs.

Starred review from July 1, 2023
An espresso-dark saga of retribution, addiction, hard science, racial justice, toxic death--and black coffee--plays itself out quirkily in and around contemporary Atlanta. Just as most of us are getting back to living (more or less) normal lives in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, here comes a novel that envisages an outrageous, eerily plausible human-made plague festering in the same city where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is headquartered. A gifted Black high school student has somehow chemically dissolved into a dark, acrid substance. For tough-minded CDC investigators Ebonee McCollum and Lauretta Vickers, it's just the beginning of a vexing inquiry into a series of similar deaths and disappearances that may be rooted in a case years before of "Black death" in a predominantly African American section of Mobile, Alabama, where generations of residents died of cancer before their 60s, likely because of industrial waste from nearby companies. One possible casualty of that slow-motion environmental calamity was the stillborn daughter of Kenny Bomar and Maddy Tusk, now-divorced chemists. Kenny is currently applying his alchemical gifts primarily to his Decatur coffee shop and to fashioning and peddling exotic variations of designer drugs. As one narrative strain follows Ebonee and Retta along their probe into what seems like a baffling epidemic of suicide-through-chemistry, a concurrent strain involves Kenny's eccentric self-destructive tendencies, primarily his self-injections of venom from various species of snake and a phone app of his devising called EightBall, which started out as a memorial for his daughter but became an addictive means of both communicating with and eavesdropping on its users, including some of the people who morphed into black goo. It becomes clear that Kenny is ultimately out for revenge against the company he blames for his daughter's death. But even after that revelation, there are many more questions than answers in Kearse's enigmatic narrative, whose deadpan tone and sudden eruptions of bizarre violence often evoke the allusive, baleful essences of J.G. Ballard's grimly visionary speculative fiction but with wittier dialogue and robustly seasoned with a rapier-keen perception of the collective psyche and complex aspirations of the Black intelligentsia. A dry, devilish amalgam of science fiction, whodunit, horror, social satire, and cautionary tale.

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