BookBrowse Reviews Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby

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A socially conscious thriller that digs deep into the murderous inclinations of America's past and present.

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Razorblade Tears, a thriller by S.A. Cosby, follows a pair of ex-convicts who team up to avenge the mysterious killing of their sons, a married couple. Cosby's novel explores these fathers' inner worlds as they struggle with unresolved issues: Not just the question of who killed their boys and why, but the regret each man feels for not having fully accepted his son's sexuality, and with it his personhood and choice of partner, while he was still alive.

Razorblade Tears contemplates the inherently murderous nature of class, race and gender norms through the arrangement of its characters and their pasts. Ike Randolph, a Black man, is shaken by his son Isiah's murder because he had always assumed that the two of them would eventually resolve their differences. Ike has felt sorry for himself, not knowing how to deal with his discomfort surrounding Isiah's queer identity, and has not seen it as his responsibility to bridge the gap between them. Buddy Lee Jenkins, the father of Isiah's white husband Derek, also feels remorse for how he treated his son. Buddy Lee is still not fully aware of the degree to which racism, along with homophobia, has shaped his world view.

When the two fathers band together to find their sons' killers in the absence of a competent police investigation, the mission they embark on through Richmond, Virginia and its environs quickly becomes a violent, impulsive, morally questionable mess. They charge into the catering business where Derek worked and destroy an arrangement of display cakes in an attempt to extract information from one of his co-workers. They go to the headquarters of a publication Isiah wrote for, the Rainbow Review, where Buddy Lee comments that the magazine "sounds pretty gay" and becomes distracted by an attractive woman there who has identified herself as a lesbian. These scenes are not without their humor — though the book has its fair share of grotesque moments as well — and Cosby leaves room for the reader to sympathize with Ike and Buddy Lee's bumbling (mostly) good intentions.

Still, killing off the story's two queer characters from the outset and making their deaths the catalyst for the self-discovery of others is a move that risks centering the fathers' pain and growth at the expense of their sons' perspectives. But Cosby leans away from a simple redemption arc, instead showing the emotional silence that follows Ike and Buddy Lee's chaotic behavior. In this space, the reader can feel their grief as well as the stark consequences of their choices. They thrive on conflict, and part of what makes losing their sons so hard is that they can no longer deal with their own uneasiness by antagonizing Isiah and Derek. They are left alone with their residual bigotry, which is no longer their sons' problem. Even as they support each other and attempt to right at least one wrong, they are aware that it will not make up for the past, and this lends a distinct sense of gravity to the book's events despite Cosby's entertaining writing.

The plot's initial elements, which uncover a vague connection between Isiah and a girl named Tangerine, are a bit too muddled to be captivating. The novel alternates between the points of view of the two main characters and of some members of a biker gang whose role in the story is not immediately clear; at this point, Ike and Buddy Lee's personal lives are the main draw for the reader. For those who can stick with it, though, there is an ending in store that draws together many seemingly disparate parts of the novel, including Ike and Buddy Lee's pasts.

Razorblade Tears is not so much about redemption as it is about the value of recognizing one's own mistakes. This is encapsulated in how Ike transforms the popular phrase "Love is love" from a defense of the love between Isiah and Derek, which he now sees needs no legitimizing, to a statement about his own failure to love: "A good father, a good man, loves the people that love his children. I wasn't a good father. I wasn't a good man." Cosby's novel has an intriguing plot once it gets going, but it is most worth reading for unexpected and gratifying moments like these.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in September 2021, and has been updated for the April 2022 edition. Click here to go to this issue.