PicoBlog

SPOILER ALERT: I briefly quote Razorblade Tears and openly discuss major plot points and events in All The Sinners Bleed, both by S.A. Cosby. 

CW ALERT: These books are damn violent, graphically so, and occasionally use the N-word; I don’t censor quoted material. 

TL; DR: All The Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby is a novel about the hunt for a serial killer in a small town that embodies America’s racial tension. While some of the plot points, especially a major one, fell a little flat for me, this book, and Mr. Cosby’s writing—specifically his use of simile—are a delight. 

When I blindly began my loose survey of contemporary mysteries and thrillers a few months ago, I quickly found S.A. Cosbys’s Razorblade Tears on several “must read” lists and immediately read it. While some of the gay content felt a touch lazy (a gay bar called “Garland’s” themed in Judy Garland imagery and memorabilia?) and the violence was surprisingly graphic (“He raised the tamper and slammed it down onto the kid’s head. The skin around the eye socket split and bones beneath shifted…He felt something wet…bits of bone and teeth…”) I adored the tale of two unlikely friends joining forces to avenge their sons’ deaths. When I then saw Mr. Cosby’s most recent novel All the Sinners Bleed on Barack Obama’s recommended Summer 2023 reading list I was eager to pick it up, and I’m glad I did. 

Prior to the novel’s events, Titus Crown has been elected the first Black sheriff of Charon County, Virginia. He is unmarried, childless, and lives with his gem of a father Albert. Titus has a brother named Marquis who has been relatively scarce, in and out of trouble since the death of their beloved mother. Titus’ love interest is Darlene, a kind enough woman he cares for but clearly isn’t impassioned over. Titus used to be in the FBI, and the reasons for his exit are dotted throughout the story, a past that continues to haunt our noble protagonist only to be predictably revealed toward the end. The plot kicks off with a school shooting that results in Titus’ officers gunning down the shooter, a young Black man named Latrell we quickly discover has been participating in the ritual torture, sexual assault, and murder of local Black and Brown children and teenagers. Lavell’s victim was a beloved teacher whose co-participation in these vaguely occult atrocities stands in equal, comparative grandiosity to how much he was loved as a community figure. To solve these crimes, Titus must contend with the local group of confederate apologist, white supremacists. We soon learn a third participant in these murders (whom Titus dubs the “Last Wolf”) is still at large, and through a well paced series of interactions, clues, and revelations,  the town’s not-so-secret secrets are revealed, including the identity of the third killer, which, if I’m being honest, was a tad lackluster of a reveal, but more on that later. 

Foundational to the novel as a whole is the current, nation-cleaving racial tension that grips America: people of color gaining greater equanimity to the anger and fear of white people who romanticize a certain kind of life winning The Civil War would have given them nearly 150 years later. The political component to this racial tension is not explored in the story beyond the voting-in of a county sheriff; not once did I have to read “MAGA” or “Donald Trump.” For this, I’ll always be grateful to Mr. Cosby. The reader experiences the examination of this tension specifically through Titus’ interactions with Charon citizens, a micro-level model of a society-sized conflict that asks the novel’s primary questions: what if the person you disagree with ideologically, politically, with whom you share no values, is someone who’s lived down the street your whole life? Someone you’ve shared consistent space with because there’s only one diner in a small town? What if the monster is someone you know as opposed to an othered “them” somewhere out there? All the Sinners Bleed breaks the anonymity of those who would oppose us, the relational interconnections of a shared history placing our nemesis at the other end of the bar instead of in The New York Times or on CNN. Early in the novel, Titus must break up a stand-off between two groups, one of them described as a “cabal of revisionists,” the other a group of “young people.” The former is led by a character named Ricky Sours who has built his entire identity on “the lie of antebellum honor and chivalry that had been shoved down the throats of every child in the South for generations.” Of Sours’ “cabal,” Mr. Cosby writes: 

[Titus had] gone to school with many of these men. Or with their children. Reggie Wilson had been on that state championship team. Kevin Cross’s daughter, Stephanie, had sat in front of Titus from kindergarten to twelfth grade. 

None of that mattered to them now. They wiped all that away until he was just a nigger with a badge. To a few of them even the badge disappeared as they reduced him to a form they felt comfortable disparaging. He felt it in the air between them, like the charge before a lightning strike. It wasn’t surprising, and that in and of itself was tragic.

Titus’ dilemma is stunning to behold. He must navigate not only being an ethical sheriff but must also do so in the face of racist bigots who have the added distinction of being people he’s known his whole life. In that quote’s second paragraph, we sense the labor required to do Titus’ job. He must disassociate from the reality that the people he’s grown up with hate him, people who comprise a sizable part of the community he now serves.  To exist and protect Charon County is to be constantly reminded of his identity in their context. Simply by being around them, he is degraded by their all too known opinions about him. Not to mention that his job also requires that he protect them.

Having to live and work like this is a contributing factor to one of the main themes of the story: the questioning of faith.  Titus’ revoking of belief, however, has primarily resulted from past with the FBI and his mother’s death. As his mother died of scleroderma he prayed god would heal her. As you can imagine, god didn’t, and because of this, Titus has turned his focus and belief to the rational, the reality of human experience instead of religion. With the exception of one specific person who shares his questioning of faith—but in a much more intense, severe context—basically everyone Titus encounters still believes, incentivizing his frustrated, even bitter, critique of christian beliefs.  For example, when questioned by a local pastor if he believes in the devil, Titus responds: “Reverend if you’ve seen the things I have, you’d realize the devil is just the name we give to the terrible things we do to each other.” As a Black man, as a sheriff, as a former FBI agent, as someone who must contend with people he’s known his whole life hating him so they can feel empowered, it’s little wonder why Titus no longer trusts god. This aspect of his character is challenged hardest by his father Albert, himself a god-fearing man whose main form of community is his church. When Albert says, “We can’t know God’s plan but the Father is still in control.” Titus responds: 

I used to believe in God’s plan. I believed he would heal Mama. Even though he’d never spoken to me. He’d never answered any of my prayers, but I still believed he’d heal her. Stop her muscles from turning to bone. Touch her with his heavenly hand and take away her pain. Stop her from howling all night. But he didn’t,” Titus said. “She died at forty years old and the world just moved on. So, when you tell me it was God’s plan for them boys and girls to end up under that weeping willow tree, I have to ask myself, which one of us is the bigger fool? You for saying it or me for listening to it?

When I first read “the terrible things we do to each other,” I was struck by the use of the inclusive pronoun “we.” An evocative added dimension to Titus’ questioning of faith isn’t simply the horrors he has seen but also what he knows he’s capable of. I mentioned earlier Titus’ time in the FBI, a guilt-soaked secret constantly weighing on him. While drinking with his brother in the last third of the novel, Titus reveals that when faced with the opportunity to arrest a cult leader, he instead killed him: “I stared down at him and realized, what had following the rules ever really gotten me?...So I shot him. Two to the head, two in the chest.” During this scene, Titus further explicates: “...the world is cruel and capricious and it doesn’t give a damn about you, and the church [Mama] loved and the God that she prayed to heal her are just placebos that don’t fix the poison we swim in every day.” This is why he joined the FBI and became a sheriff, to bring some kind of order to the chaos, but in doing so he not only waded further out into that chaotic poison—where he only found more horror instead of answers—he also discovered the poison within himself. Throughout the novel, we are given glimpses of Titus’ relationship with a woman named Darlene. She is uncomplicated, a kind person who wants the best for him, to be there for him. However, he cannot bring himself to truly desire her. She is there, and he cares about her, but he doesn’t love her. This is brought into greater relief with the return of one of Titus’ exes, a woman named Kellie who has decided to record her true-crime podcast on the murder investigation Titus is leading. We are led to understand that sex with Kellie was better than it is with Darlene: “Darlene wanted to make love even when they’d just been friends with benefits. Not have sex. Not fuck.” Of Kellie’s return to his life, he says to himself:

“...when I saw her my mouth went dry and my heart was slamming against my ribs. We used to have borderline-violent sex. To the point I used to feel dirty afterward. But I liked it. And I kinda hate myself for liking it. And there’s something wild about her that is alluring and maddening at the same time. And I don’t like being wild, feral, out-of-control.”

Titus’ guilt for desiring passionate, rough sex is in part similar to the guilt he feels for killing that cult leader back in the FBI, the un-ignorable part of that similarity being pleasure. Titus’ nobility is interspersed with that all too human desire of carnally enjoying the literal demolishing of the terrible and wanting to fuck “wild” and “feral.” 

The Last Wolf is revealed to be Royce Lazare, the local bus driver we discover was the out-of-wedlock, interracial child of a white woman from Charon’s most prominent family. Upon birth, Royce was given to a local, extremist church where he was neglected and abused by the pastor and the pastor’s wife. This was the only part of the book I didn’t exactly love. You’ll remember earlier when I wrote about the complications of knowing the person who hates you, often having grown up with them; well, because of the prevalence of this theme, I was expecting, hoping, our killer would be someone Titus knew. There were plenty of characters we learned the histories of: semi-crooked cops, friends of friends, pastors, and what a twist it would be if the killer ended up being right there the whole time. So, it felt like an opportunity lost when I discovered that the killer was someone we’ve never encountered before. To really dig into that theme of evil being in the house with you, why couldn’t the killer have been someone we loved, someone we trusted, someone we had empathy for?  Instead, we got a dude whose pain we were only told second-hand. What saves this moment of semi-paltry revelation, however, is the keystone to the theme of losing faith. In the novel’s climactic stand-off, Royce says to Titus, “[My adoptive parents] made me realize that we serve a God who is a sociopath. He set us free and lets us do things to each other, terrible things, and he and his angels just watch and laugh like Romans in the fucking Colosseum.” Our serial killer even refers to god as “Sky Daddy.” In this, Royce Lazare has a commonality with Titus, who responds:  

I know what they did to you…and I know you were afraid. And Angry. And you felt hopeless. I know what that’s like. I know how it feels to pray to God for something that you want so bad and feel like he doesn’t care. When I was a little boy, I prayed to God to save my mother, prayed all night sometimes, the way you prayed for him to save you. 

So, while, yes, I was disappointed that the killer ended up being an unknown, perhaps Mr. Cosby is reminding us that we might actually have something in common with that stranger, the monster out there in the world doing things we would never imagine. After all, isn’t that Person X also just a human who has questions about faith and god? The lives of these two characters have been different in dramatic ways, but there is a quality to their disillusionment with god and faith that is the same, two lines of questioning that must ultimately meet in the universe of this book.

I’m looking forward to Mr. Cosby’s next offering, whenever that may be, because outside of the story is the delight of his writing itself. Not only did we get a direct reference to The Silence of the Lambs, we even got an actual peeled-off face, which I can only imagine was an homage to Thomas Harris. There was even a la llorona reference on page 183, which, if you know me, is always meaningful. I was also pleased to see the ever-complicated inclusion of dreams deftly handled. Dream sequences are rarely interesting, but when relayed over the breakfast table, they can become prescient. As I continue reading contemporary mystery, thriller, and crime novels, I’m also keeping an eye on how authors deal with the proliferation of the true-crime podcast in our culture. Can a novel with a crime at its core not include a true-crime podcast? All the Sinners Bleed has all-italic, short chapters peppered throughout, and my unconfirmed interpretation is that these are meant to be the aforementioned Kellie’s podcast. I’m not exactly sure I needed them for the main plot to resonate, but I thought it was an interesting way to acknowledge this specific part of the zeitgeist. I’m excited to see how other authors deal with the same. To wrap up, I’ll leave you with some of Mr. Cosby’s similes, of which he is an enviable, master craftsman: 

“...the mention of her still wrung heartache from his father like water from a washcloth.” 

“Titus could see the muscles in his thick shoulders knotted up like coils of deck rope.” 

“The rest of the day unspooled like wax running down a candle.” 

“The clouds gathered like young men on a corner getting ready for a fight.”

“Seeing them strut down the street was like biting into a steak and tasting maggots.”

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