THE WORLD DOESN'T REQUIRE YOU

The 21st-century surge of African American voices continues with these mischievous, relentlessly inventive stories whose interweaving content swerves from down-home grit to dreamlike grotesque.

Cross River, Maryland, rural and suburban at once, exists only in the imagination of its inventor. And in his second collection, Scott (Insurrections, 2016) manages to make this region-of-the-mind at once familiar and mysterious, beginning with Cross River’s origins as a predominantly African American community established by leaders of the only successful slave revolt—which never really happened. Nor for that matter were there ever any sightings of God doling out jelly beans at Easter time in Cross River, as chronicled in the opener, “David Sherman, the Last Son of God,” whose main character is a guitar prodigy struggling through his fraught relations with local clergy and other pious folk to play the sounds only he can hear. (“God,” David remembers somebody telling him, “answers all prayers and sometimes His answer is no.”) In another story, Tyrone, a doctoral candidate in cultural studies at mythical Freedman's University, submits a thesis positing that the practice of knocking on strangers’ doors and running away is rooted in black slave insurrection; he recruits a friend for his thesis’s practical application with lamentable results. There are also a pair of science fiction stories, set in a futuristic Cross River, in which the customs—and abuses—of antebellum slavery are replicated by humans on robots and cyborgs, who, over time, resent their treatment enough to plot rebellion. And there’s a novella, Special Topics in Loneliness Studies, chronicling an academic year at the aforementioned Freedman's University during which professors and students alike struggle with their deepest, darkest emotions. Even before that climactic performance, you’ve figured out that Cross River is meant to be a fun-house mirror sending back a distorted, disquietingly mordant reflection of African American history, both external and psychic. Somehow, paraphrasing one of Scott’s characters, it all manages to sound made-up and authentic at the same time.

Mordantly bizarre and trenchantly observant, these stories stake out fresh territory in the nation’s literary landscape.