Excellent debut novel. The dangers religion brings with it, and any type of fundamentalism... ( )

A story with a touch of magical realism and a heavy dose of religious fervor. Set in the author's native Jamaica at some point in the 1950's, it is the story of the battle between two flawed individuals, each who try to take control of a small fictional town.

John Crow's Devil is an amazing first novel, with extremely interesting, well-developed characters. It's an interesting take on sin vs redemption. Neither the Rum Preacher or the Apostle are quite what they appear. It is easy to mock the townspeople of the fictional Gibbeah, but see if you can make it to the end of the story without being manipulated into looking at characters and actions in a particular way. ( )

Near perfect first novel set in Jamaica. Two reverends battle for the soul of fledgling Jamaican village in the late 1950's. James uses a voice that many readers may deem difficult to follow, at first, but really I found it quite easy to slip into the dialect. It is a fine specimen of terse literature that gets out of the story's way and takes the reader out of his comfort zone without ever letting him think about putting the book down.

Highly recommended. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

One of the things I like the most about Akashic Books is that, unlike so many other small presses, they make a deliberate effort not to put out only an endless stream of mopey character dramas about white creative-classers living in Brooklyn; take for example one of their latest, John Crow's Devil, which is instead set in the backwoods of Jamaica in the 1950s, which like last year's Jesus Boy uses a conservative Christian church to tell a story surprisingly loaded with sex, violence and other deadly sins. And indeed, there's a reason that this literary debut from the Kingston immigrant and now Minnesota professor has been compared to both Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and that's because the text itself nearly reaches the level of magic realism from its pure poetic beauty, the story of the struggle between two local preachers of whom neither is nearly as innocent as they like portraying themselves. A dense and gripping novel that emotionally radiates like the heat of the Caribbean sun, it comes recommended to those who are fans of academic writing set in exotic locales.

Out of 10: 8.7 ( )

The first novel by a young Jamaican novelist. Magic and religion conflict in a rural village in the late 1950s.