PEOPLE LIKE US – Jason Mott

“Even love has been known to decimate.”

“Yes sir, yes ma’am, my daughter’s birth made everyone in that room into better storytellers.”

“Fuck the red, the white, and the goddamned blue. Fuck it all. I need air. And fuck anybody that wants me to stay in a place that does nothing but suffocate me. I have no home, when you get down to it.”

“I’m trying to get Stephen King to blurb one of my debut authors’ books, and anytime you’re dealing with the Stephen King Industrial Complex, it requires three blood oaths, a fatted calf, an altar, and everything else I’ve got. The Obamas don’t ask for as much blood as SKIC!”

I think that the comparison between Percival Everett and Jason Mott is an easy one because of shared themes of Black trauma in America and the surprising humor that emerges in the sharp and clever writing. I loved The Trees, and Mott’s People Like Us (Dutton 2025) is in that same vein, though Mott and Everett are very different in their storytelling.

People Like Us is metafiction. Despite redacting his name throughout the novel, Mott does name himself at the end. (The various redactions cracked me up. As did the Not Toni Morrison character.) The author’s note at the beginning, which may be one of the best author notes in existence, lets the reader know that a lot of what happens in People Like Us actually happened.  Throughout the novel, Mott blends fiction with reality – centered around gun violence in America, Black trauma, and his own daughter’s death by suicide.  And all the while, a man named Remus is stalking him with intentions of murder. It’s intimate and playful, cheeky and devastating.

The novel is written in blood and tears – you can taste the salt and iron on the pages.  You can hear the thud thud of a heartbeat, the bang of a gun, the soft sounds of someone inhaling and exhaling, and laughter.  Above all, the laughter. People Like Us reads like a fever dream, and it is almost voyeuristic the way he lets readers in.  But I’m glad he did.

Read this book.