Liquid Snakes
Stephen Kearse
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Liquid Snakes
Stephen Kearse
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
A brisk, punchy read.
Clearly, Kearse is provocative, though he’s never dull. A swift glance at his essays in national publications reveals an astute, maverick intelligence, a critic who constructs his arguments carefully, just as his fiction builds upon a fine sense of the ridiculous.
Kenny is awfully dull. His calculating nature, his dry humor and his unwavering resolve to commit his act of retribution don’t seem to convey any emotional depths or deranged brio.
In this intricately woven tale centering the Black experience at the mercy of white supremacy and capitalism, Kearse challenges the meaning of criminality, posing the unspoken question of whether two wrongs make a right. If generations are harmed without recourse, is fighting back really revenge?.
... an immensely engaging read—clever and nimble in its narration, pointed in its critiques—with a chorus of interesting voices and arresting images.
The novel is set at a dizzying speed, close enough to motion sickness to spark an absurdist dialogue around the conditions and means of uprising.
There are many more questions than answers in Kearse’s enigmatic narrative, whose deadpan tone and sudden eruptions of bizarre violence often evoke the allusive, baleful essences of J.G. Ballard’s grimly visionary speculative fiction but with wittier dialogue and robustly seasoned with a rapier-keen perception of the collective psyche and complex aspirations of the Black intelligentsia..
A dazzling pharmacological thriller.