JOHN HENRY THE REVELATOR

A real-life version of the folk hero John Henry emerges in the Jim Crow South in von Hoffman’s speculative debut novel.

Fifteen-year-old Moses Crawford has some unusual characteristics: He’s taller than most grown men, incredibly strong, and impervious to bullets and billy clubs. These all come in handy for a Black kid growing up in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1935. They allow him to do things like save his uncle from a murderous group of men in Georgia without getting a scratch on him; he does this while wearing “a work shirt, jeans, a pair of boots,” he notes. “Afterward stories where I wore a costume and a mask. Never happened. Not then or ever. Kluxers wear masks.” Unfortunately, his father is not bulletproof like him, and he dies in an ensuing shootout. Then racists in the Georgia town take out their anger on their Black neighbors as soon as Mo and his uncle leave. There’s nothing scarier to these bigots than a Black man who can’t be brought down, and, to them, Mo’s very presence is tantamount to a declaration of war. Will he be able to use his unique abilities to prevent further violence, or will he cut his own path of destruction across the South? Poet, nonfiction writer, and former journalist von Hoffman writes in a clipped, muscular prose style over the course of this novel that suits his sensitive, often ambivalent protagonist. Here, for instance, Mo awakens to a couple’s rural poverty: “Everything they had in the world would add up to little more than nothing….Other than Uncle Stan, my father’s brother, I didn’t really know anyone who was poor, not like this.” The characters, particularly Moses, are well drawn, and aspects of Moses’ journey, such as the way it’s covered in the media and his efforts to translate his grassroots movement into a political one with the John Henry Party, may remind readers of events in our own time. Overall, it’s a complex work that engages with an era that feels simultaneously remote and frightfully contemporary.

An imaginative work that effectively blends fantasy and social commentary.