LIQUID SNAKES, by Stephen Kearse
Someone sound the alarms, bar the labs and give Dr. Fauci a ring — the scientists have gone mad.
Not in real life, thankfully, but in “Liquid Snakes,” Stephen Kearse’s new novel, in which two C.D.C. epidemiologists try to track down a man’s home-brewed drug that he plans to wield as a bioweapon for revenge.
The book begins with the suicide of a bright Black student named Valencia, who opens a vial of liquid and somehow dissolves, a phenomenon that becomes known as “a blackout.” She’s the first of a handful of blackouts thanks to a lethal substance developed by Kenny Bomar, a Black biochemist turned coffee-shop owner who is grieving a daughter whose stillborn death was due to chemical exposure from a pesticide plant in the family’s poor Black neighborhood. So, naturally, Kenny milks his pet snake, Amelia, for her venom and synthesizes a drug that he gives to suicidal victims he reaches through an app — his test subjects before his vengeance plan really begins.
“Liquid Snakes” seems to have several political touchstones to address — the toll of pollutants on minority communities; gentrification; capitalism; the failures and gross inequities of our health care system; the thriving economy that’s in street drugs; mental health in the Black community; the scourge of technology — and there’s a gamesome quality to Kearse’s attempts at satire as he pursues these topics. The epidemiologist crime-stopping duo, Ebonee and Retta, start off office-bound, then upgrade to interrogating sources and slinging threats like hard-boiled detectives. Clever, pretentious and a bit sociopathic, Kenny is the mad scientist Walter White-ing his way through an unnecessarily involved revenge plot.
But unlike Walter, Kenny is awfully dull. His calculating nature, his dry humor and his unwavering resolve to commit his act of retribution don’t seem to convey any emotional depths or deranged brio.
And that’s the biggest surprise of “Liquid Snakes”: Despite its lofty Afro-pessimist speculative fiction ambitions, this thriller’s plot lacks thrills or any sustained sense of urgency.
The storytelling is episodic, repeatedly pulling away from the action to create ineffectual cliffhangers that stop the book’s momentum. Short chapters bounce between various perspectives, but the characters don’t feel as if they truly inhabit Kearse’s world. Rather, they feel forced into the novel for a narrative function — to carry one story line or another, or to widen the novel’s scope. As a result, the book reads more like a diet science fiction procedural than a penetrating literary work.
Some elements do spark interest. The bits about Black mental health, especially teenagers buckling under the pressure of expectations and adults carrying racial trauma, are intriguing and feel ripe for more exploration. And Kearse’s poeticism shines through in his characters’ existential musings, as when a teenager reflects: “There was no way to know which of her choices and experiences would be adhesive, bound to her like a hex, and which ones would flake off, dead skin in the cosmic dust bowl.”
But the prose is just as likely to lose itself in such grand abstractions, falling prey to pomposity, as when Kearse writes, “Such perverse chronology, the past feasting on the future, the present stillborn into a void” (Kenny’s reflection on outliving his victims), or “that razor klaxon of absolute negation ripping across the membrane of existence” (to describe a character’s slip into a kind of suicidal ideation). Metaphors are as overdressed as a woman wearing a ball gown in a mosh pit, and they’re often paired with less than subtle imagery, as when one Uncle Tom-esque politician is described as having teeth “white as minstrelsy.” And don’t get me started on the absurd descriptions of skin and complexion. (At one point, a couple’s lovemaking session is described as a “brown-on-brown affair,” extending an earlier metaphor about the brown stain of a spilled coffee.)
“Liquid Snakes” tackles so much that it all gets muddled together in the toxic soup at the center of the book. This is a novel that won’t have us pick just one poison. The final product? Overkill.
LIQUID SNAKES | By Stephen Kearse | 299 pp. | Soft Skull | $27
