Red Now and Laters: A Novel
Guillory’s enchanting debut introduces Ti John, a young Creole growing up in Houston’s South Park neighborhood in the 1980s. Once a prominent, middle-class white community, South Park is now a ghetto plagued by violence and periodic flooding, a bizarre world saturated in mysticism, superstition, funk music, and disco. Ti John idolizes his embittered father, a cowboy and hero in the African American rodeo circuit, who grants his son a sense of freedom his overprotective Catholic mother denies him. All Ti John wants is to prove his manhood to the Ricky Street kids, whom his mother deems hoodlums. After witnessing a series of bloody misfortunes, most notably a bull disemboweling a friend’s father, Ti John disregards his mother’s cautions and emulates his father only to encounter romantic heartbreak, discover his father’s voodoo practices, and embark on a personal quest to unmask the mysterious ancestor whose ghost serves as his spiritual mentor. With dark humor and élan, Guillory’s complex and mesmerizing novel spans numerous eras of family history and southern folklore, offering a haunting yet soulful portrait of a neglected American culture. --Jonathan Fullmer