DEVIL IS FINE
John Vercher
What does it feel like when someone is trying to suffocate you while exploiting you, all the while denying its very existence?
John Vercher has some ideas.
He is in a vortex of grief. All his sentences contain the letter “I.” In all of his stories, he is the hero, at every event, the main attraction. He is concerned with how he feels, how things affect him, and how things interact with his environment. At this point in his mourning, he cannot see outside of the boundaries of himself.
He is not living in the present, unable to go back to the past, he lingers somewhere in between the horrors of yesterday and the ones sure to come tomorrow. Days after burying his sons he receives word that he has inherited a house. Not just any house but a plantation. Not just any plantation but one that his white ancestors owned.
Uncomfortable with this gift, unsure how to proceed, when he finds out the history of the plantation and its prior owners, all bets are off and a reckoning happens. We get to follow along.
God’s have big ego’s, angels are deceiving and ghosts are welcome guests. The sooner you realize the DEVIL IS FINE and comes dressed in a three-piece suit the sooner you’ll realize the scariest things in life come wrapped in boxes made of shimmering gold. If grief were an ever-present state, we would all die a lonely death. Full of regrets of having ever loved at all.
I had trouble with the audiobook. The narration felt cacophonous with one word beginning before the last one ending. Words tripped over each other, and the importance of the sentence being held within the first and second half languished like a whisper. I was much more comfortable reading with my eyes for this material.
Thanks to Netgalley, Macmillan Audio, and Celadon Books for all the advanced copies!
DEVIL IS FINE…⭐⭐⭐⭐
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