A nude man runs down a hotel hallway pursued by a clothed man wielding a big wooden coat hanger.
The naked man laments that his run-ins with married women often end in run-ins with married men. Then he laments the layout of the hotel. The hallway he is fleeing down comes to a dead end at a pair of elevator doors. If the angry husband gets him, it will happen there.
We all lean in, wondering what is going to happen next.
What happens is the Zoom call sputters and we have to wait a minute for Jason Mott to reconnect before he tells us how his protagonist gets away.
The Bowers Writers House hosted the author on Feb. 25th for the first public reading of the first chapter of his upcoming novel called “Hell of a Book.” Mott admits, “It’s a pretty presumptuous title.”
Mott, in his early 40’s and Black like his protagonist, had a quick rise in the literary world. Director of the Bowers House Jesse Waters holds an MFA in poetry from University of North Carolina Wilmington just like Mott. He says his fellow alum calls his breakaway success “the ‘lotto version’ of being a writer.”
Mott certainly has had some luck. His debut novel, “The Returned,” not only took off quickly but was also adapted into a two-season TV show on ABC, retitled “Resurrection.” That may sound like a dream come true, but there are some tradeoffs.
“Writers are almost always inherently introverts,” Mott explains. “They’re not fans of being in the public eye. They like to be off in the corner being quiet. And that is whole-heartedly, a thousand percent who I am.”
But successful authors are in the public eye and so quick success leaves less time to adjust. Mott got a taste of that life on his first book tour.
“Book tours are very exciting but they’re very grueling, very punishing. You’re in a new city every day. It can be extremely hectic, extremely exhausting. So, I had this really cool whirlwind book tour. I went from answering phones to being on a national book tour as a bestselling author. It was all very wild and wacky.”
Hardly a coincidence that “Hell of a Book” centers around a new author’s book tour.
“I thought there was good comedy there. So that was percolating for a few years and I was writing pieces of that here and there along the way, but it never felt really finished.”
Mott finally got a handle on the project after it began to merge with his own reflections on being Black in America. This was pre-George Floyd, but there was certainly no shortage of other tragedies to contemplate.
The protagonist shares a table at the hotel’s breakfast buffet with a little boy whose skin is so dark it unnerves him. The older diner feels his grasp on reality slipping and the world threatens to fall into some surreal fever dream where people are metaphors and things are not what they seem to be.
But wasn’t this preceded by a nude man running through a hallway pursued by a jealous husband with a coat hanger? What is this book? A comedy? A tragedy?
“It’s hard to describe,” Mott explains.
Partly it is therapy.
“It was therapeutic, but it was a tough therapy. Easily the most difficult thing I’ve written,” Mott said.
It is also very different from what Mott has written in the past. His other novels veer in more fantastical directions while “Hell of a Book” is more grounded. It is also, Mott says, his most original work.
“It is dramatically different than any novel I’ve written before, but I would argue it’s the first thing I’ve written since undergrad that is truly my writing.”
The author says he is taking more risks this time and finding his own voice apart from his other influences.
Mott is planning to publish “Hell of a Book” in August of this year. Your eyes may roll, but it sounds like it will be a hell of a book.
