Riot Baby

"Oh, yeah. Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, a Nigerian-American writer, is such a powerful, powerful book. It is amazing. It is, in some ways, a superhero story that literalizes power, powerlessness, and anger, and allows us to understand and view racial injustice in America in a way that I think few works have been able to do for me, at an emotional level. Tochi is an incredible writer. I’ve followed his writing for years, and it’s been amazing to see him grow and experiment, and try out different things. One of the things about Riot Baby that particularly amazed me is just the creativity and beauty that Tochi puts into using language. The characters have superpowers, and we’re talking about very spiritual concepts. So rather than just using a standard, conservative style to describe these experiences, Tochi chose to really experiment and stretch language, to describe and encompass experiences and sensations that we otherwise cannot experience. He embraces the limitations, as well as the strengths of the medium we’re working in. “To me, speculative fiction is generally the type of fiction that uses the technique of literalizing some aspect of reality that we usually speak of as metaphorical” Tochi, of course, is a very skilled screenwriter as well. But for Riot Baby , he chose to use experimental language in a lot of places, using prose to do things that film and TV cannot. I love novelists who embrace that aspect of prose writing, and make us think, and use language in ways that weren’t possible before, or that we hadn’t thought of. I just love this book. It’s wonderful. Oh, it’s inspiring. It really is. It makes you, as a writer, to want to do more, up your game, because it’s just so good."