What if toxic pollutants traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it? A Black biochemist provides an answer in this psychological thriller.
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.
