BOOKS: Smoke Kings by Jahmal Mayfield
A stunning debut novel that will leave you wondering how far you'd go to right the wrongs of the past, and the present.
SMOKE KINGS, by Jahmal Mayfield, 400 Pages, Melville House, February 2024
It’s hard to believe this staggeringly compelling, expertly plotted and written, disturbing, thought provoking, nightmare inducing crime noir/thriller is a debut novel.
Reading this after having just started to digest CASUALTIES OF TRUTH (see my last post), another novel exploring the horrors and multi-generational damage committed by racists and white supremacist terrorists, I have been pretty much gutted and, though I didn’t think it possible, even less optimistic about the incoming administration and the state of the world.
After the brutal murder of teenage Darius, his cousin, Nate, spiritually exhausted by the unceasing assassinations of Black people, sixty-two years after the lynching of Emmett Till, and with recent brutalities leading to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Stephon Clark, Alton Sterling, on and on and on and . . . . devises a plan to exact reparations and retribution from descendants of those who committed racist crimes in the past, forcing them to pay into a community fund from which the ancestors of the wronged will benefit. Nate involves Darius’s brother, Joshua, and their friends, Rachel and Isiah. When Nate’s out of control rage results in unintended consequences, the quartet are targeted by the feral leader of the Righteous Boys, a group of soulless racists, as well as Mason, a detective hired by one of Nate and friends past targets looking to find out who was behind his abduction and blackmail. Mason, an ex-cop, also exhibits racist beliefs, which he subdues to win an assist from Elizabeth, who runs an organization investigating the lost history of racism who is ultimately victimized because of Mason’s lies and misdeeds.
There are far more complications and layers and characters in the storied “tangled webs we weave” throughout this novel which lets no one off the hook for their behaviors and hatreds. Well written and fast moving, this literary fiction thriller will haunt you, make you question your beliefs and behaviors, and wonder to yourself what you would do in defense and protection of your loved ones, and in an effort to somehow undo the damage done by past wrongs.
The labyrinthine articulations and effects of racism — both its current, active assaults and the ways in which it has shaped history and experience creating an inequality that has yet to be admitted and confronted, let alone compensated for — are stunningly evoked by Jahmal Mayfield in SMOKE KINGS.
Read it. But know it’s not a feel good nor a happily ever after.
And here I am, going.