Mr. Death: Four stories

by Anne Moody

102 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Anne Moody was an American author who wrote about her experiences growing up poor and Black in rural Mississippi and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement through the NAACP, CORE, and SNCC. Raised in Centreville, Mississippi, she was the oldest of eight children and began working for white families at a young age while excelling in school. She attended Natchez Junior College on a basketball scholarship before transferring to Tougaloo College, where she became deeply involved in civil rights activism.
As a student, Moody participated in protests, including the infamous Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in in Jackson, where she and fellow activists endured violent attacks from a hostile crowd. She worked for CORE during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and was arrested for her participation in demonstrations.
In 1968, she published Coming of Age in Mississippi, an acclaimed autobiography that vividly depicted the realities of racism and segregation in the South. The book received widespread recognition, including awards from the National Council of Christians and Jews and the National Library Association. She later wrote Mr. Death: Four Stories in 1975, a collection of short stories exploring themes of mortality.
Moody lived in New York for much of her life, working outside the literary spotlight and largely avoiding public appearances. She briefly lived in Berlin in the early 1970s and later returned to Mississippi in the 1990s. Though she continued writing, many of her later works remain unpublished. Her contributions to literature and civil rights activism remain an essential part of American history.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

So bizarre and shocking it's no surprise that the book is out of print. But these stories are way weirder and more compelling than so much of modern literature. Sad that this was her last work – no idea what I've just read, but craving more.

[Greg Kerestan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is, without a doubt, a VERY weird book. I've seen it described as a book for adults (likely) and as a children's book (odd but not entirely out of the realm of possibility). If it is indeed a children's book, it's among the strangest, bleakest and most haunting ever written, and one chock full of profanity, graphic violence, sex and trauma of all kinds.

I have vivid memories of reading the first story, "Mr. Death" as a preschooler or kindergartener and having intense, unsettling dreams because of it; this is a deeply affecting, macabre Freudian nightmare of a story, a suicide note in the form of a dream. "The Cow" and "All Burnt Up" aren't quite as haunting, but their mix of the everyday prosaic and the sudden shift into tragedy and bloodshed makes them stand out from the average children's or young adult fare. But it's "Bobo" that probably packs the strongest punch save for the title story; Anne Moody keeps on delaying the reveal of exactly what kind of story this is going to be, until the final few paragraphs unveil a sudden shift in tone from children's story to graphic horror.

The closest this comes to fitting any genre at all is probably Southern gothic, and Anne Moody is traveling in the same paths as Flannery O'Connor or Joyce Carole Oates here. But I'm not sure Oates ever wrote something as hauntingly symbolic as "Mr. Death," or O'Connor anything as almost leeringly nasty as "Bobo." Give it to your kid when they're four, and see how they turn out- I'm fine, right?

[Keith zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

These four stories are concisely written, deeply affecting and sad. The title story reminded me a bit of Henry Dumas and his mingling of the supernatural with harsh realism, while The Cow reminded me of Guadalupe Nettel’s collection Natural Histories, in which the lives of people and the animals near to them have unsettling parallels. Moody was a contemporary of Dumas but wrote this collection years before Nettel’s, and I only point out the similarities as a sort of helpful/lazy descriptor, as i’m having trouble describing the stories myself.

[Andrea Engle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strange book ... each story spotlights death, but also has something to say about love