Jason Mott Wrote One Hell of a Book

With his fourth novel, North Carolina writer Jason Mott has written a book that is both hilarious and horrifying, meditative and breathless, absurd, and, ultimately, true.

Words by Wiley Cash | Photos by Mallory Cash

In the midst of Hell of a Book, Jason Mott’s new novel — a chaotic fever dream swathed in a meditation on race and police violence — the narrator, who happens to be a novelist on tour in support of his debut, gives the reader a brief moment of insight into the pressures and expectations of life on tour:

Sometimes, you tell people you’re an author and they’ll pull out their phone and Google you, right there in front of your face. They’ll type in your name and, depending on the search results, decide for themselves whether or not you’re truly what you say you are. The modern author is only as important as their search results.

If you were to have looked up “Jason Mott” in 2013 during his first book tour in support of his debut novel, The Returned, you would have found countless photographs of him in multiple publications and at various events around the country. You would also have learned that The Returned was a New York Times bestseller and had been adapted into “Resurrection,” a TV show that ran for two seasons on ABC. But those search results might not have been enough for some people, certainly not the white woman in Kentucky who took one glimpse at the cover of The Returned and asked Mott why there was a white boy on his book; and probably not for the white police officer in Baltimore who sat in his patrol car, glaring at Mott and his friend — a Black man who happened to work for the NSA — while the two of them stood talking on a street corner after having dinner. 

Aside from the expectations of being a Black author on book tour in front of largely white audiences, coupled with the pressures of being a Black man in America, Mott also began to feel the strange, dislocating nature of a chaotic book tour, with its blur of hotels, media escorts, flights, interviews, and bad food. For Mott, the experience culminated one morning while he was being driven to the airport. It dawned on him, as the car careened down the interstate, that he had no idea what city he was in, and he had no idea what city he was traveling to next. 

He came home from that first book tour determined to write an absurdist, comedic novel about an author on tour. Over the years, no one — from his agent to his editor — was particularly interested in the idea, and during that time Mott wrote and published two more novels: The Wonder of All Things (2014) and The Crossing (2018), both of which were supported by book tours that deepened his conviction that the experience was something worth exploring in fiction. 

Eventually, Mott parted ways with his publisher, cleared his desk, and set out to complete the book tour novel he’d been working on for years. But those plans were altered quickly by the pervasive national news stories of  Black people being killed by police. The cycle seemed to be on repeat, the only thing different about each story being the name of the victim and the city in which the killing took place. Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland. Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio. Eric Garner in New York City. Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, Georgia. Mott realized that he was trying to write an absurdist novel about an author on book tour, but he could not get away from the fact that nothing could be as absurd as living as a Black person in America, where he could be unarmed and still die at the hands of the public servants who had taken an oath to protect him. Mott decided to pause his work on the book tour novel and write toward the way he was feeling about the cycle of police violence. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to get this out of my head, because it’s overwhelming me,’” he says.

The result was the deeply personal story of a young Black child growing up in the rural South, struggling to come to terms with the realities of race, racism, and the threats of racial violence. Mott found himself writing about a boy nicknamed Soot because of his dark skin, for which he is routinely mocked by other children. While Soot grows up in a loving home, threats to his life and to the lives of the Black men and women in his community are omnipresent. Soot’s father wants him to live life without reservation, encouraging him to “Treat people as people. Be color-blind. Love openly. Love everyone,” but he also warns his son of the strictures of being Black in America, especially in the South, which the novel refers to as “America’s longest-running crime scene”:

You will be treated differently because of your skin. The rules are different for you. This is how you act when you meet the police. This is how you act growing up in the South. This is the reality of your world.

Hell of a Book opens with a gorgeous scene of 5-year-old Soot and his parents in their home, the little boy sitting on the floor in the corner of the living room, willing himself to be invisible. His parents seem to celebrate the fact that their son can render himself unseen, but when Soot questions the reality of whether or not he was able to disappear, his father assures him, “It doesn’t matter if I saw you or not. … All that matters is that you felt safe.”

Mott admits that this is a practice he has perfected throughout his life. “Even now, I have a habit of trying to be invisible or to disappear or not to call attention to myself,” he says. “It can all be traced back to that realization of what cops are or what cops can do.”

In his own youth, Mott’s mother and father made clear to him that life was different for Black children, especially where Mott grew up in southeastern North Carolina, in a rural community called Bolton. Recalling his initial thoughts about his parents’ outlining of the rules for Black children when dealing with white people, especially police, Mott says, “You go through a period of trying to reject that, of thinking that’s just old people talking, and that’s arguably the most dangerous period for the child, because they don’t understand that the rules are different for them. Once you start to understand, you get paralyzed and become very angry at the world and at the fact that things are different for you, and at some point you have to come to terms with that or it destroys you from the inside.” In Hell of a Book, these discussions between Black parents and their children are referred to as “the bonsai of a child,” which is to say the trimming away of possibilities that renders Black children “capable of a little less love, capable of a little less imagination, capable of a little less life.”

Mott knew that he was writing a novel grounded in the cold, hard realities of personal experience, place, and history, but what he was writing could not fully speak to the absurdity of police violence in America. Then he remembered the project about the author on tour, and he realized that by intertwining that narrative with the story of Soot, he could write a novel that was both hilarious and horrifying, meditative and breathless, absurd, and, ultimately, true. 

“I wanted to capture the chaos and comedy of a book tour and at the same time have a very heavy conversation about race,” he says. “I wanted the reader to go underwater in the heavy sections, and then come up and get a breath of air and laugh and giggle while knowing they’re still swimming in the deep part of the ocean.”

The second chapter of Hell of a Book opens as an unnamed author is on tour in support of his novel, which is also titled Hell of a Book. Both the author and his story are blank canvases of sorts; we do not know who he is, and he has no memory of writing his wildly successful debut, and he also has no idea what the book is actually about and no clue of where he is at the moment. “That’s how a book tour feels,” Mott says. “Not having your bearings, always being tossed around. I wanted to capture that level of chaos and confusion.” But the more Mott wrote and the more he intertwined the stories of Soot and the author, the more he understood that he could use a “level of chaos and confusion” as a metaphor for being Black in America. Out of that space, a third character was born: a ghostly apparition of an “impossibly dark-skinned” child simply known as The Kid, who may or may not represent the ghosts of all the Black children who have died by police violence. Before it is apparent to the author, it becomes apparent to the reader that The Kid is the psychological, historical conduit between the author and Soot, linking the man’s forgotten past to the childhood he has written about in order to forget. It is through these strands — the breakneck speed of the book tour and the meditative experiences of Soot’s childhood — that Hell of a Book gathers its power and manifests its themes of racial terror, cultural memory, and personal experience. The author lives in a world of his own making that is born new every day, and Mott argues that “as a Black man in America, that is what he uses to cope with his day-to-day existence.” But in the novel, the author’s present — whether he grasps it fully or not — is inexplicably tied to Soot’s past, and The Kid continually causes him to return to it.

Jason Mott still lives and writes on the land where he grew up in rural North Carolina. “I love it,” he says. “Small town, dirt road. Everybody’s family in some way.” His childhood was spent in a community of 12 or 13 houses, where children played together in the woods, drinking water from the garden hose and eating lunch at whoever’s house happened to be closest. But he has clear memories of his parents warning him against leaving what he refers to as the “inflated safe space” of the dirt road. 

“Out there, you’re still the descendants of sharecroppers,” he says. “All that is instilled in the land and the structure, and there are parts of town you don’t go into.” He pauses for a moment. 

“But that’s the story of Black people in America. You’re always trying to find your bearings, your settled space. And you rarely find it. You find it in communities and friends, regardless of the color they are, but the moment you leave that port, you’re back out to sea, and it’s a sea of chaos, and you’re always looking over your shoulder, trying to understand where you are.”

Wiley Cash is the author of The Last Ballad, This Dark Road to Mercy, and A Land More Kind Than Home. He serves as the writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and lives in North Carolina with his wife, photographer Mallory Cash, and their two daughters. For The Bitter Southerner, he has also written about Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s 2020 novel, Even As We Breathe.

Mallory Cash is an editorial and portrait photographer based in North Carolina. Her work has appeared in the Knoxville Museum of Art and numerous publications including The New York Times, Oxford American, and The Bitter Southerner.

In The General Store

From the Magazine

Support Southern Storytelling