Night Soil
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"You'd think it has been done before but it really hasn't—the perfectly crafted, haunting and heartbreaking, raw, funny, unblinking yet merciful art novel."—Marlon James
Family secrets, sexual explorations, art world wealth, and legacies of racism and environmental destruction collide in the new novel from Lambda Award-winning author Dale Peck.
A century and a half of family secrets are written on Judas Stammers’s body, painted purple by a birthmark that covers half his face and abdomen. Judas is the last descendent of a 19th-century robber baron who made his fortune off the slaves who died in his coal mines. The money’s gone, but the legacy lives on in the form of an all-male, all-black private school founded by the family patriarch in atonement for his sins. Ostracized for his name as much as his appearance, Judas’s lust for his classmates is matched only by their contempt for him, until finally he’s driven to seek out sex in places where his identity means nothing to the anonymous men he gives himself to.
Hovering over everything is Judas’s mother, Dixie, an acclaimed potter whose obsession with creating the perfect vessel over and over again leaves her son that much more isolated. By turns philosophical and perverse, Night Soil is a tour de force by the writer whom Alexander Chee called “the only genius I know who could write it and live.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This elegantly written sucker punch of a novel from Peck (Visions and Revisions) is told mostly by a tortured young man growing up in the shadow of his family's racist, rapacious past. Judas Stammers lives with his eccentric mother, Dixie, a potter famous for her precisely identical spherical pots. They move home to somewhere in the South, where Dixie discovers the perfect clay in the soil her ancestor, Marcus Stammers, defiled to establish (and make a fortune from) a coal mine, dug by slaves who died there. Judas, marked metaphorically by an enormous birthmark, attends the private boys' academy Marcus founded and fights angst and loneliness in his head and also with sex, a lot of it, in a roadside rest area bathroom. When he goes looking for answers about who his father was and what exactly his family's legacy is, he unearths unspeakable secrets but also makes an unexpected human connection. Judas contemplates the existential dilemma at the core of civilization: "Persevere despite the absence of hope, or give up and forfeit what it means to be human." Peck's moving, precisely rendered prose binds the reader to Judas with a knot tied so tightly that the character and the novel are impossible to forget.
