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When reading African-American writer SA Cosby's novel Blacktop Wasteland, about a diamond robbery gone awry, two facts are immediately apparent: the novelist - or his main character - loves cars, and he derives evident pleasure from fashioning fantastic metaphors. On the fourth page, for example, Cosby writes: "When he started the car, the engine sounded like a pride of angry lions. Vibrations travelled up from the motor through the steering wheel. He tapped the gas a few times. The lions became dragons."
It is the kind of phrasing that makes one laugh, but on second reading it sounds a tad corny, though not any less enjoyable.
Blacktop Wasteland, published last year, is Cosby's third novel after Brotherhood of the Blade - The Invitation and My Darkest Prayer. It is followed by Razorblade Tears, which was released on 6 July, the blurb for which reads: "A Black father. A white father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance." It is seemingly an exploration of homosexuality and retribution.
The novel begins somewhere in Appalachian country in Virginia, in the deep American South, as Beauregard (Bug) Montage is out at an illegal night-time race. Montage, the novel's chief protagonist, is an African-American car fanatic and excellent driver who can handle the wheel as if the spirit of the late Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna himself were on him. Montage's wife Kia, with whom he has two sons, once told him that he felt about cars the way "most people felt about puppies".
The reason he is at an illegal race is because his car workshop is being undercut by a...