Hell of a Book

Soot is a young boy around ten years old and the protagonist of the alternating chapters narrated in the third-person perspective. He starts the novel out at five years old and ages to ten years old the narrative goes on. Soot’s skin is “not just black, he’s impossibly dark-skinned” (22). This dark skin makes him the victim of bullying as he grows and leaves him feeling alienated even from other Black kids. Aware of his difference, Soot’s parents try to teach him to be The Unseen, or to turn invisible. This invisibility is meant to keep him safe, especially from racial violence that they are all too familiar with. Soot’s father William eventually is victim to anti-Black police violence, Soot meets the same end. Existing as a kind of ghost or hallucination after his murder, Soot appears to the first-person narrator in the alternating chapters. In those chapters, he is called “The Kid.” Soot requests that the narrator tell his story; it takes the duration of the novel for the narrator to agree. 

While Hell of a Book offers the unique story of Soot’s life, Soot also serves as a representative for Black people, children in particular, in the United States. As the narrator struggles to see the difference between him and Soot, he also comes to see how he, Soot, and other Black people are linked by a shared experience: “And I know it because he and I are the same. Me and everyone who looks like me are the same” (318). When Soot is murdered, his death echoes the many boys who have died as victims of police violence. 

William is Soot’s father. He is a tall, dark-skinned, funny and kindhearted: “Humor was one of his gifts” (6). William is also very skinny. Due to his insecurity about his thinness, he always wears long-sleeved and loose clothing to hide his body. William is plagued by a fear of and discomfort with being looked at. This is most obvious in terms of his insecurity but also manifests in his discomfort with being looked at as a Black man. We see this when he goes for a run:

He could believe, just then, that the whole world was gone away and all of the eyes that had been watching him were finally gone. He wasn’t being watched anymore. He didn’t stand out. Every moment of his life, he felt that he stood out. Too tall. Too skinny. Too Black. All of it swallowed him up some days. There were eyes everywhere, watching him, staring at him. (110) 

William’s anxiety about being perceived is why he and his wife teach Soot to be invisible. William associates danger with being looked at and believes that his son can be safe if he can be unseen. Safety and invisibility become synonymous in the novel and appear always paired together: “unseen and safe” (5). William’s anxiety about being seen ties into the theme of the danger of Black visibility, and how Black people are often subjected to discrimination and violence based on visual markers.

Soot’s unnamed mother is a worrisome but kind and loving woman. She wears a ponytail and is a short woman. She undergoes a transformation after the murder of her husband, William. In the first chapter, she expresses her love by cooking a delicious meal for her son when he temporarily disappears and comes back. However, she becomes more of a disciplinarian after William’s death: “She showed her love through discipline and structure. She showed her love through spanking and punishments” (252). In Chapter 23, she is spanking Soot with a belt for having stolen a comic book. Her love is informed by fear and worry and grows firmer as she hardens in the aftermath of her husband’s murder. Soot’s mother offers an example of tough loving parents and the effects of trauma on parenting. 

Soot’s Mother also becomes a stand-in for the first-person narrator’s mother. When she appears to him in the television studio in Chapter 26, she bears a striking resemblance to his own mother, who is also short and wears a ponytail. It is through his hallucinated conversation with her that he is able to face the painful memory of his own mother’s death and begin to address that trauma. In many ways, Soot’s parents bear similarities with the narrator’s parents. Soot’s mother also takes on a representative role of the grieving mothers of Black children who have been shot. The narrator writes, “She is my dead mother and she is The Kid’s mother. She is the dead mother of all the dead sons, dead daughters” (288).

Tyrone Greene is an eighth-grade student who bullies Soot on the school bus. He is the son of a farmer, and physical labor has made him “broad as any man” (29). Tyrone has “a sharp nose, and light-brown skin, and a slightly crooked smile” (29). Tyrone represents the bullying that Soot faces. We learn later in Chapter 16 that Tyrone is also Soot’s cousin. This is the reason why Soot forgives Tyrone for the bullying; he believes that he must always forgive his family.

Tyrone also introduces the concept of colorism into the narrative. Colorism is the preferencing of lighter-skinned individuals of a racial group because of the perceived proximity to whiteness. It is an intrarracial manifestation of racism that devalues darker skin. The uneven power dynamic between Tyrone and Soot is informed by the fact that Tyrone is light-skinned, and Soot’s skin is very dark. The novel explains, “Tyrone was the mirror that reflected the blackness Soot wanted to be and could never be” (32). In other words, Tyrone represents a Black person who can escape some of the challenges of being Black because of his superficial proximity to whiteness. 

Daddy Henry is Soot’s grandfather and William’s father. He is a sickly old man living in a rest home in the small southern town of Whiteville. Soot loves his grandfather because he is always kind to him and tells him stories. However, William hates Daddy Henry because he forbade William from drawing Black people when he was a young artist. William accuses Daddy Henry of making him hate Black people, which Daddy Henry denies. This is likely the reason that William is so self-conscious of his appearance and goes running at night when he cannot be seen.

Daddy Henry’s disdain for drawings and writing about Black people evokes the theme in the novel of Blackness as subject. Daddy Henry’s internalized racism causes him to insist that Black people should not be the subjects of William’s drawings; he tells his son that he could only be successfully drawing white people. Daddy Henry also repeatedly refers to Black people using the n-word. He doubles down on this self-hating rhetoric when he encourages Soot to write stories but insists, “No [n-word] stories, okay? You gotta do it right!” (55). The idea that doing it “right” means doing it white reinforces the novel’s concerns with intergenerational trauma.

Sharon is the first-person narrator’s publicist. She is a tall and thin woman, typically wearing expensive designer clothing. Sharon is stoic and normally unemotional; “her judgment is as cruel and sharp as any Khan of the Old World” (218). Sharon is also always busy on her cell phone. Indeed, half of the narrator’s interactions with her in the novel take place over the phone. Mott uses Sharon’s character to comment on the ubiquity of the media, social media, and the virality of police brutality cases. Sharon connects the narrator to the many interviews on his book tour and maintains awareness of current social issues. 

Sharon also represents the grind of capitalism and consumerism. She is constantly coaching the narrator on how to be marketable, relevant, and profitable. Although Sharon is emotional in Chapter 8 when she reads the news about Soot’s murder, she later exploits that tragedy as a marketing tool for the narrator’s career. She sets him up for an interview with Soot’s mother and sends him to his hometown where the incident took place.

Jack is the first-person narrator’s media trainer who appears in Chapter 8. Jack is unbelievably handsome and talks quickly in confusing, philosophical language. His fast-talking characteristics remind the author of a character in his own book named John, who is also based on the narrator’s father. This comparison is the first glimpse the readers are given into what the narrator’s Hell of a Book is about.

Like Sharon, Jack represents consumerism and fake appearances. It is no coincidence that the narrator relates him to a commercial: “Jack looks like he stepped out of a Christian Dior ad once upon a time and decided never to go back” (88). Further, because of Jack’s larger than life personality, the narrator struggles to know for sure how much of Jack is real and how much of him is imagined. This is emphasized by bizarre choices of words, such as “laramie-perpendicular” (107). Regardless of what is true and false, Jack’s whole persona is about constructed appearances. Indeed, his role as a media trainer is to teach the narrator how to curate a public personality. He says, “This is the room where I’m going to train you to become you” (90). By underscoring the difference between a private and public identity, Jack’s character touches on the theme of invisibility in the novel. As an author, the narrator is hypervisible, so Jack attempts to show the narrator how to edit this visibility.

Uncle Paul is Soot’s uncle and his mother’s brother. He is a large, dark-skinned man with a confident presence. Following William’s death, the townspeople’s responses are divided. Everyone is outraged, but some find comfort in the minister’s words at the church. Others refuse the minister’s call to passivity and step out of the church to decide how they can ensure that William’s murderer is held accountable. Uncle Paul is among the angry men in town. While the novel never shares if the men ever carry out their revenge, we do know that Uncle Paul goes so far as to learn where the guilty officer lives.

Uncle Paul also represents one of two parental responses to anti-Black violence. Soot’s parents refused to have “The Talk” with him about how he must behave differently because he is Black and, therefore, vulnerable to white discrimination and violence. They chose to shield him from that reality rather than prepare him for it. Instead, they opted for a defensive approach: they teach him invisibility. Unfortunately, this invisibility does not save him in the end. Uncle Paul, on the other hand, wants Soot to be prepared for racial prejudice and takes the offensive approach. He decides to teach Soot how to use a gun so that Soot can protect himself in the future.