Hell of a Book

Every other chapter in Hell of a Book follows the story of an unnamed first-person narrator. He is a 38-year-old African American man, as well as the newly popular author of a novel titled Hell of a Book. This narrator struggles with a condition that he describes as an “overactive imagination” (20). This condition entails hallucinations that make it difficult for his to differentiate between reality and imagination. The condition also entails acute memory loss. While he characterizes himself as a “glass half-full kinda guy (19) and demonstrates a sense of humor, he struggles to maintain stability in his life. He is also a womanizer, as demonstrated in Chapter 2 when he is caught sleeping with another man’s wife and immediately after sleeps with a hotel receptionist.

Throughout the novel, struggles with his mental health and the unaddressed trauma of his mother’s death. Part of his condition includes specifically forgetting memories that are painful. It is only revealed at the end of the text that his Hell of a Book is about his mother’s death; he has blocked it out of his memory until that moment. These memory gaps and his frequent hallucinations make him an unreliable narrator. There is conflicting information between chapters, where he is unaware at one point that he is Black, and later seems to have always known his race.