This memorably gothic novel is Tiffany McDaniel’s first published work (but, by her own account, the eighth or ninth she has completed). As the winner of last year’s Guardian Not the Booker prize, it divided opinions sharply, some readers finding its relentlessly intense language and biblical plot too much to swallow. But the story of how Autopsy Bliss, a lawyer in the tiny Ohio town of Breathed, invited the devil to visit is a wildly riffing trumpet voluntary that sustains its thrilling high notes from start to finish. The narrator is Autopsy’s son, Fielding Bliss, looking back from wretched old age to the neon-coloured summer of 1984 when Sal, a dishevelled 13-year-old boy, answered his father’s invitation. Did Sal bring the crushing heat with him? Did he cause the seemingly endless sequence of calamities that devastated the town that summer or was a different kind of evil insinuating itself among the citizens of Breathed? A startlingly rich imagination shouts its glorious arrival in this overwhelming narrative of sin, redemption, love and death.
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