★ 2023-06-08
An espresso-dark saga of retribution, addiction, hard science, racial justice, toxic death—and black coffee—plays itself out quirkily in and around contemporary Atlanta.
Just as most of us are getting back to living (more or less) normal lives in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, here comes a novel that envisages an outrageous, eerily plausible human-made plague festering in the same city where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is headquartered. A gifted Black high school student has somehow chemically dissolved into a dark, acrid substance. For tough-minded CDC investigators Ebonee McCollum and Lauretta Vickers, it’s just the beginning of a vexing inquiry into a series of similar deaths and disappearances that may be rooted in a case years before of “Black death” in a predominantly African American section of Mobile, Alabama, where generations of residents died of cancer before their 60s, likely because of industrial waste from nearby companies. One possible casualty of that slow-motion environmental calamity was the stillborn daughter of Kenny Bomar and Maddy Tusk, now-divorced chemists. Kenny is currently applying his alchemical gifts primarily to his Decatur coffee shop and to fashioning and peddling exotic variations of designer drugs. As one narrative strain follows Ebonee and Retta along their probe into what seems like a baffling epidemic of suicide-through-chemistry, a concurrent strain involves Kenny’s eccentric self-destructive tendencies, primarily his self-injections of venom from various species of snake and a phone app of his devising called EightBall, which started out as a memorial for his daughter but became an addictive means of both communicating with and eavesdropping on its users, including some of the people who morphed into black goo. It becomes clear that Kenny is ultimately out for revenge against the company he blames for his daughter’s death. But even after that revelation, there are many more questions than answers in Kearse’s enigmatic narrative, whose deadpan tone and sudden eruptions of bizarre violence often evoke the allusive, baleful essences of J.G. Ballard’s grimly visionary speculative fiction but with wittier dialogue and robustly seasoned with a rapier-keen perception of the collective psyche and complex aspirations of the Black intelligentsia.
A dry, devilish amalgam of science fiction, whodunit, horror, social satire, and cautionary tale.
Finalist for the Libby Book Awards
The Boston Globe, A Best Book of the Summer
The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
Kirkus Reviews, A Best Book Club Fiction Book of the Year
“Liquid Snakes is a strange, disorienting puzzle; a mocking eulogy; a bitter, self-lacerating exercise in what one character calls 'vivid ideation'; a long look into a sinkhole of grief. It twists in your hands and in your heart before biting down." —Noah Berlatsky, Los Angeles Times
"Tangled and disentangled at once, Stephen Kearse’s Liquid Snakes is both a diabolical thriller and wicked political satire set in, and unleashed upon, Atlanta. It’s a swinging beaker-bubbler, for sure, so far out-of-the-ordinary that it tests the limits of comprehension, moving at such speed there’s hardly time to consider the cosmic amorality of its main player, a 'former chemist' named Kenny Bomar, the book’s tragic fiend . . . Liquid Snakes [...] is a stratospheric bolt shot in the general direction of the James Webb Telescope. As a joker, he’s deadly serious, acquiring more than adequate command over the formulas necessary for his narrative purpose." —Jeff Calder, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"The best sci-fi allows us to see our own world through new, more awake eyes; it’s safe to say that Stephen Kearse understood the assignment." —Charley Burlock, Oprah Daily
“In his new novel Liquid Snakes, Stephen Kearse turns this concept on its head, offering a bold speculative vision of a world reckoning with crises both personal and societal.” —Tobias Carroll, Vol 1. Brooklyn
"An immensely engaging read—clever and nimble in its narration, pointed in its critiques—with a chorus of interesting voices and arresting images." —Jake Caselle Brookins, Chicago Review of Books
"In Liquid Snakes, Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison meet Stephen King for a jarring story of agency and autonomy in a world hell-bent on snuffing out both . . . It’s certainly a read that will lurk in the corners of your mind long after the book closes." —Jennette Holzworth, Southern Review of Books
"Liquid Snakes is a compelling dystopian novel that rewards careful reading and uses the structure of a criminal investigation to channel righteous anger and explore weighty questions." —Molly Odintz, CrimeReads
"An espresso-dark saga of retribution, addiction, hard science, racial justice, toxic death—and black coffee—plays itself out quirkily in and around contemporary Atlanta . . . Kearse’s enigmatic narrative [...] deadpan tone and sudden eruptions of bizarre violence often evoke the allusive, baleful essences of J.G. Ballard’s grimly visionary speculative fiction but with wittier dialogue and robustly seasoned with a rapier-keen perception of the collective psyche and complex aspirations of the Black intelligentsia. A dry, devilish amalgam of science fiction, whodunit, horror, social satire, and cautionary tale." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A dazzling pharmacological thriller that dances on the knife’s edge of satire . . . Written with incisive wit and studded with references to Black popular culture [...] and troubling incidents from recent history, this entertains even as it deeply disturbs." —Publishers Weekly
"Stephen Kearse is a fearless writer who has created an endlessly entertaining cast of characters. Liquid Snakes sits at the timely and unsettling intersection between public health and crime, and I was furious that it had to come to an end." —Kashana Cauley, author of The Survivalists
“What if the communities poisoned by Big Chem turned their enemy into a weapon, wielding molecular magic for revenge—and maybe also liberation? Kearse takes this clever premise and, with his distinctive style and low-key humor, crafts a story that will grab hold of your brain and blow it to bits. Like nothing else I've read, in the best possible way.” —Nicola Twilley, Co-host, Gastropod; co-author, Until Proven Safe: The History & Future of Quarantine
“Who poisons who in Stephen Kearse’s inspired Liquid Snakes? A slippery, satirical, quick-witted trip through the lives of misfits forced to find the line between clarity and revenge, annihilation and release—frequently hilarious, unexpectedly tender, and resolutely of our time.” —Geoff Manaugh, New York Times-bestselling author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City (and/or Executive Producer, We Have A Ghost)
"Restless, searching, and totally gripping. Kearse has written a brilliant novel that manages to be, among other things, a pharmacological thriller and an incisive meditation on the poison-pen letter." —Hannah Gold, critic and author
