John Vercher’s Devil Is Fine opens with a heartbreaking and humbling scene I don’t think I’ll ever forget. The unnamed narrator is driving his car in a funeral procession when he encounters road construction, noticing a dancing flagger. The funeral procession is for his seventeen year old son Mal, and when the narrator has a panic attack, the flagger eases the narrator through it with compassion. I was hooked right away, drawn in by the story, as well as Vercher’s lyrical writing style.

You had been our only remaining tether, Mal. A tenuous thread to which I’d clung, a climber’s belay rope protecting me from the peril of rocks below. Selling the land would have been a way to say good-bye, at least in part, to my grief and guilt…. But doing so might also have taken a knife to the last threads of that rope connecting your mother and me, and once cut, I’d have nothing to slow my fall, with no thought of where I’d land, but knowing the fall would be hard enough I’d never make the climb again.

John Vercher, Devil Is Fine

The narrator, who is biracial, soon learns he has inherited land upon the death of his son from his estranged white grandfather. He travels to the small beach town to sell the property, only to discover he is now the black owner of a former plantation—and harrowing secrets are buried beneath the dirt.

Vercher does a marvelous job blending what’s real and what’s not as our narrator processes his grief, shock, and finds himself more aware of the micro-aggressions he’s allowed to slide in his work and personal life. The side characters are fabulous, organic, perfectly supporting this strange journey our narrator is on.

With dark humor, our narrator grapples with the past, the present, and the belief that his dead son is haunting him. In fact, the story is basically a one-sided conversation from father to son. The story slowly evolves, revealing what caused the son’s death and what secrets the plantation holds.