Rerun: “Hell of a Book”

Saturday Review: ““The Black Condition” in Hell of a Book” a review by Helen Stead of Hell of a Book by Jason Mott in NCLR Online Winter 2022

As we patiently await the new book reviews coming soon, we will again share a few older reviews from both our online and print formats.

We are also impatiently awaiting National Book Award winner Jason Mott’s newest novel, People Like Us, coming out early August! We’ve written about Mott many times over the years.

In this review for the award-winning book, Stead wrote, “It is crises like [George Floyd’s murder] that North Carolina native Jason Mott explores in Hell of a Book, asking whether black authors have a responsibility to provide commentary in their fiction on what it means to be Black.” From the unreliable narrator to the speculative fiction vibes of the story, Mott’s writing encourages the reader to pay attention. Stead continued, “…the entire novel works in layers of metafiction, which delightfully complicates the question Mott must wrestle with: how much of himself has he written into the book? Is the book about him? Or is it about something larger than himself?”

A native of Bolton, NC, Mott earned his BFA and MFA from UNC Wilmington, where he now teaches. His first two books are poetry collections, We Call This Thing Between Us Love (2009) and “. . . hide
behind me . . .” (2011), both published by Main Street Rag. His debut novel, The Returned (MIRA,
2013) a New York Times Bestseller, was adapted as a television series titled Resurrection. His other
novels are The Wonder of All Things (MIRA, 2014) and The Crossing (Park Row Books, 2018; reviewed
in NCLR Online 2019). A national bestseller, Hell of a Book also received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award
for Fiction; was longlisted for the 2022 Carnegie Medal Fiction, the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize,
and the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize; and is also on several 2021 lists of “must reads.” Read an
interview with Mott in the 2019 print issue.