Play Book Tag discussion

This book is one wild ride. A modern, irreverent, race-bending retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the book tells the story of recently fired English professor, Chris Jaynes, and his literary crusade to find the real-life locations depicted in Poe's book. At once a literary critique, a farcical dark comedy, and genuine horror tale worthy of a Jordan Peele adaptation, Pym absolutely swings for the fences and hits it out of the park.

Rarely have I been so entertained and genuinely reviled by the content of a novel. Jaynes' iteration of the Pym adventure, which involves an all-black crew setting out to Antarctica once Jaynes discovers one of the characters in Poe's novel really existed, is full of twists, turns, and literal monsters, some of which aren't human. The racial commentary is brilliant, pointing out time and again how absurd the social construct of race is: we are frequently reminded Jaynes is light-skinned enough to pass for white, yet his lived experience is as a black man. This facilitates a number of encounters in the book that demonstrate the real horror was white supremacy all along. Very reminiscent of Mexican Gothic in a way that I loved, though with more unapologetic humor. I think pairing those two novels together would be a great experiment, as they're grappling with many of the same themes.

He is joined by a hilarious cast of ensemble characters, each of them dealing with being black in different ways: Angela and Nathaniel try to embody the myth of "black exceptionalism," Booker Jaynes is all about fighting the "white power" of the monsters they meet on the ice until he is (literally) seduced by it, Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter try to commodify their experiences and chase fame, and Garth Frierson is at once both the most earnest character and blinded by his love for the famous (and super racist) painter, Thomas Karvel. (view spoiler)[Truly, no place on earth seemed more horrifying to me than Karvel's gas-guzzling BioDome utopia, blasting Fox News commentary all hours of the day and painted with an American flag on its roof. (hide spoiler)]

The retelling of Pym's story, despite having the script flipped at every turn, still manages to faithfully follow the format of its preceding novel in ways that continued to surprise me again and again (view spoiler)[right down to the dog that inexplicably appeared and disappeared at various points in the plot (hide spoiler)]. In that way, the novel warns you many times over of its abrupt and unsatisfying end, so that (view spoiler)[I was not surprised that we never are sure whether Chris Jaynes and Garth reached Tsalal, the mythic black utopia, or rather just found one of many possible inhabited places, given that the majority of the world are people of color. I found that a fantastic note to end on, one last dig at Poe's overtly racist undertones in his work (hide spoiler)].

I can't recommend this novel enough to anyone interested in horror, dark absurdist comedy, and reckoning with the racist past, especially in literature. It seems lately Lovecraft has been a popular punching bag for the racism in his books, but Pym rightly points out that tradition certainly predates him, and challenges it in a smart, hilarious, and genuinely scary way.

I read this when it first came out along with the novel it was based on. I have to say you managed to get more out of it than I did.

Great review.