Hell of a Book
by Jason Mott
Summary
An unnamed Black novelist is on tour for his runaway bestseller, which is called Hell of a Book, and he is very good at the job: charming on morning radio, smooth at the signings, expert at saying nothing. He also has, as he cheerfully warns the reader, a condition: an imagination so overactive that he cannot always tell what is real, which matters, because a boy has started appearing to him, in hotel rooms and airplane seats, a child so dark skinned the author names him The Kid, who may be a ghost, a hallucination, a memory or the country's conscience assigned to him personally.
In alternating chapters, somewhere concrete, a boy called Soot grows up in the rural South, dark in a family that teaches him, as a survival skill, to be unseen, and the novel's braided engine is the slow convergence of the two threads: the author's tour is happening in the immediate aftermath of a police shooting of a Black child, an event everyone at every stop wants his comment on and his book to be about, and which he alone appears not to remember. The comedy, and the book is genuinely funny, media handlers, a love interest who may not exist, the author's rules for staying charming, keeps buying cover for a grief that arrives, when it arrives, with full weight.
The design is the point: a book about the demand that Black art perform the wound, narrated by a man using imagination as anaesthesia.
Around three hundred and twenty pages.
Best for readers who want the police violence novel refused its usual shape, absurdist, slippery and finally direct.
Historical Context & Significance
Hell of a Book won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2021, and its win completed an unusual arc: Jason Mott had been a bestselling but not prize adjacent writer, his debut The Returned adapted into a network television series, and the fourth novel's swerve into metafictional grief caught the prize culture entirely by surprise, including, by his own delighted account, Mott himself, whose acceptance speech dedicated the award to all the other mad kids, the outsiders, the weirdos and the bullied, became the ceremony's moment.
The novel's full title runs to a Dickensian length, promising the altogether factual story of a big dreams, hard luck, American made mad kid, the exuberance advertising the method.
Critics placed it in the lineage of Ellison and the absurdist wing of the Black literary tradition, beside Whitehead and Beatty's Sellout; the comparisons the Wilmington papers drew, Mott is a proud North Carolinian, ran the same way. He followed it in 2025 with a sequel of sorts, People Like Us, returning to the author character and Soot; the first book remains the calling card.