Fellow white people: this might not be a book to listen to on audiobook, or at least you might want to be mindful of where/how you listen to this book as the N-word is used copiously throughout this collection.

I'm not sure what to say about this collection, and I wasn't even sure that I wanted to rate it until I finished the satire of Academia, "Special Topics in Loneliness Studies." This collection is filled up to the brim with bad and cowardly men. Well, bad men and a bad robot. Combined with a certain sharp edge to the stories, there is little pleasure in this text. This is a collection obsessed with the ways in which its protagonists lie to themselves as much as they lie to others.

All of this takes place in the cunningly-rendered fictional location of Cross River, MD, a city formed through a successful slave revolt that is still trying to figure out what to do next. Scott lays down the layers of myth and fable in Cross River, with the earlier stories serving as framing and filling in background information for "Special Topics...", the novella at the end of the collection.

I'm still digesting how I feel about this collection. Hm.