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Synopsis:

What if toxic pollutants traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it? A Black biochemist provides an answer in this wildly original novel of pollution, poison, and dark pleasure

In Atlanta, Kenny Bomar is a biochemist-turned-coffee-shop-owner in denial about his divorce and grieving his stillborn daughter. Chemicals killed their child, leaching from a type of plant the government is hiding in Black neighborhoods. Kenny’s coping mechanisms are likewise chemical and becoming more baroque—from daily injections of lethal snake venom to manufacturing designer drugs. As his grief turns corrosive, it taints every person he touches.

Black epidemiologists Retta and Ebonee are called to the scene when a mysterious black substance is found to have killed a high school girl. Investigating these “blackouts” sends the women down separate paths of blame and retribution as two seemingly disparate narratives converge in a cinematic conclusion.

Liquid Snakes is an immersive, white-knuckle ride with the spookiness of speculative fiction and the propulsion of binge-worthy shows like FX’s Atlanta and HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness. Transfiguring a whodunit plot into a labyrinthine reinterpretation of a crime procedural, Stephen Kearse offers an uncanny commentary on an alternative world, poisoned.

Review:

When Liquid Snakes was released this past August, I saw ads for days on all of my social media. Most of the time, I can ignore the ads, but this one seemed persistent. The name of the book, along with the cover and author photo intrigued me. I am not a synopsis reader by nature. I like to go into books as cold as I can. This means I usually judge a book by it’s cover and by the press that published it. Soft Skull Press has been around for decades, and it is a press I have loved for a long time. For me to be inundated by ads for a novel to be released by Soft Skull Press, with the name, cover, and author photo that it had, I just had an inkling that this would be a book I would enjoy. They were right.

The story is split in half. The first is Kenny Bomar, a coffee shop owner who has also made a drug that will literally melt anyone who drinks it, turning them into a black hole of sludge right where they are standing. The second is about Ebonee and Retta, two women who work for the CDC that are trying to follow the trail of the drug and it’s manufacture, while also dealing with tensions between each other and everyone whom they have to negotiate with. 

This is not a typical novel. There are weird quirks and sections that barely make sense to the rest of the novel at the time. Some moments pretend to pull away from the story, but there are also some of these parts that make me think that this story is bigger than the story that is being told. Stephen Kearse does not spend much time putting these pieces of the puzzle together for you, but lets you put them together in any order that you see fit. This is why some readers have had a hard time following the plot. The plot is not specific, and this is why different people will catch different meanings in this novel, and also why this novel is a good one to reread.

Even though Stephen Kearse has an interesting story in process, there are moments when he addresses the way that people in this country, black people specifically, are categorized and when they do not fit into the mold that is already built for them. White people do not always know how to react. Ebonee and Retta has more issues with this seeing as how many of the people they are trying to work with on their investigation, the men in charge, dismiss them immediately. This is when they go along their own path. Kenny also spends the entire novel going down his own path, and he is a character that does not hide his emotions. He has lost a child, and he is pissed at everyone, particularly those who let it happen. His grieving is going to affect everyone around him and his drug is manufactured from a place of anger and grief. He does not want retribution or reparations. He wants revenge. There are ideas in this novel that are much much bigger than the space that the idea is given, so this does make for a novel that feels a little off-kilter in places, and a little unfinished in others. This is not a perfect novel, but it is definitely a novel that will make me read Stephen Kearse’s next book.

Sometimes people ask me how I find the books that I read, movies that I watch, and music I listen to. I find that the easiest answer is that I do not look for these things anymore, but they all find me. Liquid Snakes is one of the prime examples of a book that found me. I am glad to have given it a chance, and the ad algorithm was right. This is the type of novel I enjoy, and I gravitate toward.