Bill Cheng, a New Yorker inspired by a love of the blues, offers a debut novel of astonishing mood and vision set in the Jim Crow-era South. Music plays a small role in the narrative, but the mysterious and heady language of Southern Cross the Dog is thrillingly alive with an otherworldly mix of accursedness and transcendence that echoes the blues.
Robert Chatham is Cheng's modern-day Odysseus, moving through the stations of post-slavery privation and heartache. After the great flood of 1927, his parents, still grieving his lynched brother, send him off to be an errand boy at a brothel. Later, he joins a crew clearing land for an electric dam that promises to bring cold milk and bright-kitchen modernity to the South in exchange for denuding huge swaths of the Mississippi wild. Then, after nearly drowning in the river after a suicidal attempt to rescue some of the crew's equipment, he's saved and imprisoned by a near-feral family of French trappers. When he is finally reunited with two childhood friends, Robert finds them too broken and insane to offer much solace or help him with the devil on his own tail.
If Cheng hadn't crawled so deeply into the part-real, part-mythical world of the music he loves, Southern Cross the Dog could have been a pretentious work of cultural appropriation. But this young writer has instead, with a complete lack of guile or affect, written a new masterpiece of the South. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic