Devil Is Fine

January 1, 2024

Vercher's Three-Fifths and After the Lights Go Out both made best-book lists. Here he explores identity and reconciliation with the past. Reeling from the death of his son, the novel's biracial narrator reckons with the legacy of an inheritance--land that turns out to be a former plantation. With a 100K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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April 1, 2024
At 17, Malcolm is dead, and his father, a frustrated writer, camouflages his grief and guilt beneath anger, bitter jokes, and pharmaceuticals. The son of a Black father and white mother, he is leery of being pigeonholed as a chronicler of Black trauma as his literary career stalls, his teaching position is in jeopardy, and he's perturbed by waking nightmares. Estranged from Malcolm' s mother, he is flabbergasted at inheriting beachfront property, originally gifted from his white grandfather to Malcolm. As he explores the land, confronting real-estate agents, local government functionaries, pesky journalists, and ethically dubious archaeologists, strange and terrible secrets are revealed, and troublesome visions connect him to his lost son and the white ancestors he has repudiated. Soon things become increasingly sinister as he finds himself reenacting sins of the past and awakening to discover writings on his laptop he does not remember creating. Vercher (After the Lights Go Out, 2022) masterfully builds a haunting tale of grief, family secrets, and unacknowledged crimes of racism that inevitably resurface. With dark humor, psychological suspense, ghost-story elements, and echoes of Percival Everett's Erasure (the source of the film American Fiction), Devil Is Fine is a multilayered portrayal of one man's struggle with his personal demons and a white society's steadfast refusal to confront its own.

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April 15, 2024
In the wrenching latest from Vercher (After the Lights Go Out), a struggling biracial writer reckons with his painful family history. The unnamed novelist addresses his narration to his late 17-year-old son, Malcolm (the cause of Malcolm’s unexpected death isn’t revealed until later), as he grapples with his bitterness toward the publishing industry and his white grandfather, who lives in a nursing home and is estranged from the narrator because of “some racial stuff.” After Malcolm’s funeral, the narrator receives a letter from his grandfather’s attorney, explaining that his grandfather had given Malcolm a mid-Atlantic oceanfront estate, and that it would now transfer to him. After human skeletons are discovered on the property, he learns it was once a slave plantation and has been passed down through the generations of his white ancestors. While visiting the property, he has vivid visions of an ancestor brutalizing enslaved people in the name of saving their souls. The boy heretic in his visions refuses to submit, saying, “Better to reign than serve.” In a beautiful and weighty turn, these nightmarish scenes help the narrator to better understand Malcolm’s rejection of the Christian faith his father attempted to instill in him. Readers won’t be able to look away. Agent: David Hale Smith, InkWell Management.

June 1, 2024
A biracial man deals with the death of his son and the inheritance of a plantation. The first thing the narrator of Vercher's new novel says is, "The morning we buried you, a road flagger danced in the street." He's addressing Malcolm, his 17-year-old son, who recently died; on the way to the cemetery where the boy is to be buried, he experiences a panic attack and is comforted--as much as he can be--by the flagger, who recognizes his symptoms. The narrator's life is already challenging: He's estranged from Malcolm's mother, and his job as a professor might be in peril because he can't sell his new book. (A colleague urges the narrator to return to his literary roots: "The mixed-race angle on your first one was brilliant. People love that stuff. You know, socially relevant but not threatening. Something for everyone.") Things get worse when the narrator learns he's inheriting a few hundred acres of land from his loathed white grandfather--and it turns out to be a former plantation that still has the corpses of enslaved people on its grounds. The narrator, a recovering alcoholic, starts drinking again and makes a series of poor decisions while trying to manage his grief: "Who decides the appropriate amount of time you need to cope? This person or persons have to exist, right? Do they have an actuarial table calibrated for sorrow?" Vercher's novel is gut-wrenching, but he leavens it with some humor; one of the narrator's fellow bar patrons calls him names like "Colson Half-Whitehead" and "Phony Morrison." His prose is self-assured, and while some of the dialogue comes across as a bit too movie-ready, most of it sparkles. It's an intelligent book that never loses its heart. A solid novel that's both funny and heartbreaking.

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