The Occidental Book of the Dead: A Novel

Summary

“An adrenaline-filled high-wire act. It’s funny when it needs to be, hard to track when it wants to be, and meticulously engineered at every moment. It is storytelling from a writer who knows the fundamentals of the craft well enough that he can break all the rules and still build a propulsive story.” —Jason Mott, The New York Times Book Review

"Johnson’s prose is nothing short of spectacular… . This is a stunning novel, one that asks us to consider who we really are as Americans, not who we tell ourselves we are. Johnson has proven that he is one of the country’s finest writers of fiction, and this is his tour de force." —Michael Schaub, The Boston Globe

From the PEN/Faulkner finalist and National Book Award longlisted author of Welcome to Braggsville, comes this audacious and darkly funny literary crime masterpiece centered on a Black cop in an Atlanta precinct, whose façade of white alliance begins to crumble after a highly publicized murder

George Washington Jonson is determined to forge a new life. After growing up in one of Atlanta’s poorest housing projects, he enlists in the U.S. Army and finds some relief serving abroad. When events lead him back home, he joins the police force. It’s 1992, and Jonson is patrolling the streets he grew up on alongside his new partner, a shady legacy cop and self-described “redneck” who takes Jonson under his wing.

After a decade on the job, Jonson has fashioned a new life in an affluent suburb with his white wife and stepson, though he’s still policing his old neighborhood, and now tasked with training hot-headed rookie recruits. One night on patrol a split-second confrontation with a white teenager takes a violent turn. That single gunshot sets into motion a series of escalating lies.
When the white-washed veneer of Jonson’s life begins to crack, the story splits, presenting two contrasting versions of the American experience as he’s forced to confront the history that shaped him and the compromises required of a good man in a broken system.

Employing a bold, inventive structure and spanning two fraught decades, vividly evoking the complexities of the South, and written with his trademark virtuosic dissonance, The Occidental Book of the Dead is a propulsive, pyrotechnic exploration of corruption and conspiracy in a nation divided.

"No one is having more fun with language than T. Geronimo Johnson. The way his mind works is endlessly entertaining, inviting us into a fantasia. Of men behaving badly in a world behaving worse." — Attica Locke, New York Times bestselling author of Bluebird, Bluebird