Books › White tears
White tears
352 pages
A feverish, dread-soaked descent into the dark, unquiet ghosts of America's musical past.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like putting on a pair of high-end headphones only to realize the audio track is slowly driving you mad. It begins as a sharp, cynical satire of hipster culture and the obsessive commodification of Black art by privileged white youth. But as the narrative progresses, the steady rhythm accelerates into a propulsive, hallucinatory nightmare. The prose is intensely sensory and auditory, wrapping the reader in a claustrophobic, dread-soaked atmosphere where the boundaries between past and present, reality and delusion, completely dissolve. It is a deeply unsettling experience that forces a visceral confrontation with the ghosts of American history. This will thrill readers who love their social critique laced with supernatural horror and feverish psychological suspense.
- Mood
- dread-soaked
- hallucinatory
- claustrophobic
- feverish
- Tone
- satirical
- obsessive
- cynical
- unhinged
- haunting
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- cultural appropriation · haunting legacy of racism · obsession and authenticity · commodification of Black art · historical trauma
- The writing
- Sharp, rhythmic, and intensely auditory, shifting seamlessly from biting social satire to fragmented, hallucinatory horror.
- The arc
- Begins with the detached cynicism of privileged youth before plunging into a terrifying, disorienting nightmare of historical reckoning.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave literary thrillers that weaponize sharp social critique, blending supernatural dread with deep dives into musical history.
Content notes
- racism and racial slurs
- violence
- murder
- descent into madness
- police brutality
About the book
"Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation."--Amazon.com
Description from Open Library.
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