“It’s a character study within the framework of a crime story,” Cosby said of the novel.īut “Blacktop Wasteland” isn’t a novel of social instruction it’s an exhilarating heist story, kicked off with a plan to steal diamonds, leading to car chases rivaling some of the best in any medium. Bug spends much of the novel trying to outrun the fate preordained by his father - and to protect his own sons against the same. A man who drag races when he needs cash, burning rubber in a souped-up Duster left to him by his father, Ant, “a ghost without a grave.” Ant was a charmer, a wheelman for local heists who disappeared, leaving his teenage son to go to juvie for a crime he committed to save his father. Bug, on the other hand, is a man you don’t want against you in a fight. Beauregard “Bug” Montage is a man living double in fictional Red Hill County, Va.: upright citizen Beauregard is a family man with an auto repair business. “Blacktop Wasteland,” Cosby’s first novel with a major publisher, continues to perfect his highly original voice and perspective, dramatizing the complexities and contradictions of rural Black life.

“I wanted to be the Black Stephen King or the Black Clive Barker.” But after dropping out of college to care for his ailing mom and spending a decade working odd jobs while writing on the side, he found traction in crime fiction, where his high-octane storytelling, realistic characters and complex take of Black masculinity have struck a chord with a growing number of fans.

“At 10 years old, I would read one of King’s novels and for the next two weeks would sleep with a silver butter knife under my pillow because I was terrified of vampires,” Cosby said with a laugh.Įncouraged by his mother to rewrite books whose endings he didn’t like, Cosby began with horror. His uncle introduced him to Travis McGhee and Mike Hammer, and an aunt passed along her Stephen King. Reading was entertainment for Shawn’s family, so he read what they did - his grandmother’s True Story magazines, his mother’s Harlequin romances.

“ Blacktop Wasteland,” out this week, is his second crime novel set in the rural South. “I grew up in the poorest part of Virginia, so poor, we didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was 15 or 16 years old,” the 46-year old Cosby, who goes by Shawn, began when we spoke recently. Cosby, one of the most exciting crime novelists I’ve read this year, what inspired him to become a writer, his natural storytelling ability quickly becomes apparent.

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