MAJESTIC HILLS

Black professionals fleeing the city navigate a placid danger in the idyllic exurbs of Majestic Hills.

Josephine Taylor Blaque and Langdon Blaque’s enviable marriage and lives of achievement and purpose are unsettled by their move to a seemingly perfect planned community. Forty miles outside Chicago, leafy Majestic Hills, in fictional New Pointe, Illinois, is home to trust fund money, white flight refugees with gun collections and itchy trigger fingers, and urban professionals like attorney Josephine and Langdon, an emergency room doctor who’s grown weary of the violence he regularly tends to in the city. Josephine was deeply resistant to the move, citing the town’s lack of diversity and a sensibility that reminded her too much of the Jim Crow south her father had fled, but Langdon insisted that this change was something they needed, even putting down a hefty deposit without her buy-in. But McMansions and manicured lawns are no guarantee against pain, even in a subdivision so shiny, new, and hastily constructed that the clubhouse is still being built. As they settle in, the novel strikes a hard balance between heightened elements—the symbolic “Blaque” surname, neighbors in white hooded beekeeper gear who look like KKK members marching in the distance, a mysteriously nightmarish prologue—and the relatable challenges of everyday life. Voicing her trepidation about moving out of Chicago, Josephine compares the Majestic Hills vibe to the infamous 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia: “Living in the woods is not a selling point. Makes me think of Unite the Right maniacs with their tiki torches and replacement theories…And lynchings.” But the text is highly aware of its own intensity. References to “strange fruit” and Frederick Douglass abound. And conflicts that begin in a showy way grow deeper and more nuanced as the story progresses. These are not subtle strokes, but these aren’t subtle times.

An effective blend of allegory and harsh reality, this social drama grows stronger at each turn.