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Still reeling from a sudden tragedy, our biracial narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged white grandfather.
He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of selling the land immediately and moving on. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is far more complicated than he ever imagined. In a shocking irony, he is now the Black owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother's side of the family.
Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovering and reclaiming a painful past. With the wit and rawness of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, Devil Is Fine is a gripping, surreal, and brilliantly crafted dissection of the legacies we leave
What are you reading this week? (2024-10-31)
I'm reading Devil is Fine by John Vercher. I've not read him before but I'm loving this one. It's about a bi-racial man who is grieving the death of his son when he learns he has inherited a...
-Anne_Glasgow
"Vercher (After the Lights Go Out, 2022) masterfully builds a haunting tale of grief, family secrets, and unacknowledged crimes of racism that inevitably resurface. With dark humor, psychological suspense, ghost-story elements, and echoes of Percival Everett's Erasure (the source of the film American Fiction), Devil Is Fine is a multilayered portrayal of one man's struggle with his personal demons and a white society's steadfast refusal to confront its own." ―Booklist (starred review)
"In the wrenching latest from Vercher, a struggling biracial writer reckons with his painful family history…Readers won't be able to look away." ―Publishers Weekly
"Vercher's novel is gut-wrenching, but he leavens it with some humor; one of the narrator's fellow bar patrons calls him names like 'Colson Half-Whitehead' and 'Phony Morrison.' His prose is self-assured...It's an intelligent book that never loses its heart." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Vercher's [third] novel provides a startling perspective, even darker than American Fiction, on what it means to be a person of color operating within our nation's book-publishing industry. As the unnamed narrator copes with parenting a teenage son, he receives an unexpected inheritance from his white mother's family that triggers tragic visions ― and allows him to at last untangle his feelings about his own identity." ―Los Angeles Times
This information about Devil Is Fine was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
John Vercher lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and two sons. He has a BA in English from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in creative writing from the Mountainview Master of Fine Arts program. John was an assistant teaching professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University, was the inaugural Wilma Dykeman writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and is the 2024–2025 artist-in-residence at Monmouth University. His debut novel, Three-Fifths, was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune and Booklist. It was nominated for the Edgar Award and the Strand Critics Award for Best Debut Novel. His second novel, After the Lights Go Out, called "shrewd and explosive" by the New York Times, was named a Best Book of Summer 2022 by Book Riot and Publishers Weekly and a Booklist Editors' Choice book of 2022. His novel, Devil Is Fine, was named one of Time's Must-Read Books of 2024 and has been longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize.
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