Hell of a Book

The chapters in Hell of a Book are demarcated by two different side profile silhouette images. The first is of a little boy, looking upward to the left; the second is of a man in a hat looking slightly downward to the right. The chapters written in the third-person perspective and dealing with Soot’s story are preceded by the image of the boy. The first-person narrator’s chapters are preceded by the man’s image. One can infer that the boy represents Soot, and the man represents the first-person narrator. Also, the silhouetted man’s hat looks like a fedora hat, made popular in the 1950s. This is a callback to the old movies that the narrator loves to watch and borrows language from like “Dollface” and “Toots.” Because the images are silhouette profiles rather than outlines of profiles, they visually reinforce the motif of blackness in the novel.

Because the first chapter is Soot’s, the relative orientation of the silhouettes appears to be that they are standing back-to-back. We see the boy before Chapter 1, looking to the left, and the man before the second chapter looking to the right. This orientation implies the literal and emotional separation between the two parallel narratives.