Staff Pick: David Doody

Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil is a haunting account of Gibbeah, a remote Jamaican town in the 1950s. The story is an epic tale of two men of God, Pastor Bligh, known as the “Rum Preacher” for his penchant to drink, and “Apostle” York. When York comes to town and takes over Bligh’s church he demands that the people become his followers, but in the guise of God. When Bligh sobers up and comes looking to take back what was his, the ensuing struggle for the church, indeed for the souls of Gibbeah’s people, is grounded in the stuff that makes us human and the earth the earth, while otherworldly events come spewing out of all of it.

James is a gritty writer whose prose can have you squirming in your seat. In his ability to describe the most unseemly of events, we are brought into a world of struggle, both with the most basic of human elements and the most profound questions our nature leads us to ponder. While James’s newest book The Book of Night Women has been critically lauded (and rightly so) as of late, it would behoove you to go back to his first novel to see him cutting his teeth on the story of Gibbeah.

Marlon James will be reading, along with John Wray and Ronaldo V. Wilson in New York at (le) Poisson Rouge on Wednesday, August 5 as part of the InDigest Magazine 1207 Reading Series.

Bio: David Doody is Guernica’s blog editor and a founding editor of InDigest Magazine. Read his last recommendation here.

Tags: books, staff recommendation

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