Hell of a Book is the title of a book that an unnamed, rather undescribed main character of Hell of a Book has published. To their surprise, there book achieved much publicity and popularity, and it skyrockets him into the status of a successful author.
The book opens as the protagonist is on a book tour, and being chased by another character somewhere in a hotel in the Midwest. The protagonist had been caught sleeping with a married woman, and her husband was quite upset, and he has to run around the hotel naked to escape him. Asking for a new key to his room, the main character later starts intimately seeing the receptionist.
The book takes a darker turn as the successful author starts frequently hearing about the death of a Black boy that was shot to death. Due to ambiguity throughout his conversations, it is not apparent whether only one child has been shot or there were simply countless similar incidents.
To help him understand what is going on, he starts talking with an unnamed Black boy. The boy is given the nickname "Soot" because of the color of his skin, but not many other physical details are given about him. Soot explains how his mother had wanted to have a child that could escape the realm of racism and would never have to be afraid. However, Soot has endured struggles of living near violent crime and being looked down upon due to the color of his skin.
The novelist and Soot work together to try to understand their true place in the world, but they never reach a concrete conclusion. As difficulty for African American men continues, so does the similarly difficult quest of the protagonist and Soot to find solace in who they are. Mott goes into detail on how racism is a large problem in the current-day United States. Soot grows up to be in the present an unnamed novelist on a sex-, alcohol-, and drugs-fueled book tour for his very successful Hell of a Book that makes readers weep and try to delve into the author’s life “story.” We never learn what’s in the author’s compelling book, but Mott gives us reason to believe that the author may have invented the Soot backstory. It would make the author sympathetic and explain why he imagines he is accompanied on the tour by the “Kid,” also a very black boy and frequent mentor. Dedicated to “Mad Kids,” Hell of a Book sometimes has the feel of a Young Adult novel gone rogue.
Mott has refused on scrupulous literary grounds to write about the Black experience, but the tour occurs in the spring of 2020 when the author cannot avoid seeing young Black Lives Matter protesters and imagines, for a time, that the Kid has been killed like the many Black boys and men whose deaths are being protested. The author becomes “woke.” When the public finds that his father was shot and when a boy is killed in the author’s North Carolina hometown, he returns there to come to terms with his past and maybe write this book.
