Good better best. Never let it rest until your good is better and your better is best.
This was a popular sports chant when I was playing little league baseball. It’s also a great way to describe S.A. Crosby’s career.
I have yet to read his first book My Darkest Prayer. I should remedy that soon. At any rate, his first big hit was his sophomore effort Blacktop Wasteland, which I thought was a fun, southern take on the first Fast and Furious movie. His second one Razorblade Tears was a knock-me-on-my-keester potboiler about race, sexuality, and fatherhood. It’s still seared in my mind. One of the best things I read in 2022 and I wasn’t sure Crosby would be able to top it.
Well he did. Because wow.
This book is billed as a mystery-suspense one but it’s really a horror novel about the Black experience in the mid-south. I’ve heard the Get Out comparisons but I think those miss the point: this is a book so strongly rooted in its atmosphere of rural Virginia that the setting is almost as great of a character as the MC.
But not to be outdone, the MC is a fascinating character as well. Yeah there’s some familiarity (man-comes-home, tortured soul) but I was really invested in Titus’ life and well-being. And that’s why this book pulses with such energy: Titus keeps digging deeper and deeper into a current crime, revealing past ones, all of it coming to a hilt in a Charlottesville-like confrontation.
It’s a violent book but it’s not a depiction of gratuitous violence against Black people, not the kind of torture porn that often pops up. It takes you through the full experience and it takes you like a rocket through space. I’m still catching my breath. It’s excellent. Probably the best thing I’ve read in 2023.
