A brisk, punchy read ... A strange, disorienting puzzle; a mocking eulogy; a bitter, self-lacerating exercise in what one character calls "vivid ideation"; a long look into a sinkhole of grief.
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 ... But Liquid Snakes, his second novel, is a stratospheric bolt shot in the general direction of the James Webb Telescope. As a joker, he’s deadly serious, acquiring more than adequate command over the formulas necessary for his narrative purpose. He often short-circuits chronological time with filmic editing techniques to produce artful disorientation ... The paradox of Liquid Snakes is that Kearse’s seemingly worst impulses — adolescent wildness and nihilistic 'fifth force' energy — are among his best, and they are controlled in such a way as to lend this book’s often-radical bleakness an inexplicably rejuvenating tonic
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 ... Despite its lofty Afro-pessimist speculative fiction ambitions, this thriller’s plot lacks thrills or any sustained sense of urgency ... The prose is just as likely to lose itself in such grand abstractions, falling prey to pomposity.
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? ... It takes a sharp eye to stay on top of this read, which weaves a complex plot structure offering just enough inference to keep the brain engaged. It is heavy with suicidal ideation, and perhaps overwritten in some spots, with entire paragraphs so thick with metaphor and imagery that the meaning becomes clouded ... The prose, however, was beautiful, full of lines that evoked deep emotion and understanding of the character’s experience ... Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison meet Stephen King for a jarring story of agency and autonomy in a world hell-bent on snuffing out both. It’s a complex narrative of individuals searching for their own answers amid the framework of a larger community seeking a path forward in the midst of pain, a journey that opens the door to questioning morality which asks what constitutes revenge when injustice persists. It’s certainly a read that will lurk in the corners of your mind long after the book closes.
... an immensely engaging read—clever and nimble in its narration, pointed in its critiques—with a chorus of interesting voices and arresting images ... Full of shifting textual rhythms, pop cultural references, and darkly comedic moments among its depressing realities, Liquid Snakes constantly surprised me with its clever asides and details.
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 ... Kearse’s structuring of his novel with this unreliable community of characters who reject the dichotomy of antagonist/protagonist by making shockingly stark decisions plunges the knife deeper and deeper into a retributory consciousness.
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 ... Written with incisive wit and studded with references to Black popular culture... and troubling incidents from recent history, this entertains even as it deeply disturbs.
