RIVER OF BLOOD

In O’Fuel’s novel, a cop with familial baggage and personal hang-ups comes to see urban American policing in a new light.

Sean Tower is the most recent in a family line of police officers working for “the force” (often italicized in the third-person narration). His grandfather Billy Tower had been something of a legend in the precinct, and his own father, Kelly, had continued his tradition by adopting the same brutal “violence cure[s] violence” philosophy. However, when Sean, as an impressionable youth, witnesses his dad assaulting Rocket Davies, a mentally unstable, lightning-damaged menace in their neighborhood, the young man’s psychology undergoes a fundamental shift—he becomes pathologically incapable of lying, a trait that’s both a blessing and a curse for this future officer of the law. On joining the force, he finds himself both lionized for his family background and vilified for his ethics. He dwells in a world of law enforcers who are arguably more corrupt and dangerous than the criminals they encounter—cops who murder an innocent man after entering the wrong home, who shoot anxious children, who pimp out underage girls to other cops, and who leave a disembodied head on a sidewalk for an hour for their own amusement. Sean is, inevitably, gradually worn down by the immorality, but when his best friend dies in an apparent domestic incident, his way of looking at the world changes once again.

This is a violent, relentless, and angry study of police violence and community tensions in urban America. The writing is often superb, dodging clichés and establishing a voice that’s at once authentic and literate. O’Fuel has taken the curious step of eschewing dialogue altogether in the first half and introducing it subtly in later stages. This decision, coupled with a rapidly shifting montage of vignettes, makes the long opening chapter feel disorienting and detached, as though readers are eavesdropping on anecdotes at a dinner party. The narrative’s frequent temporal leaps and episodic nature don’t make for a light reading experience, and keeping track of characters and piecing together the chronology will be strenuous for even the most attentive reader. The broader plot arc does reveal itself over time, but it demands a good deal of patience before it becomes truly rewarding. The initial shortage of dialogue, however, is, in some ways, a successful experiment—it’s surprising how one doesn’t miss it—but equally, it strips the cast of some much-needed humanity. One receives a huge amount of detailed information about key players, but the lack of dialogue means that one never really gets to know them on a deeper level. O’Fuel seem to be going for a William Faulkner–meets–George Pelecanos vibe, and, in some respects, he pulls it off. The same sense of gradually dawning realization that runs through The Sound and the Fury and the TV show The Wire is evident here, and although O’Fuel’s book falls short of those landmarks, it’s still a satisfying experience—and one that’s well worth the effort.

A fragmentary and arduous but ultimately potent tale of good and evil.