All The Sinners Bleed

Thrillers and crime novels aren’t a genre I usually have much interest in, but in the last few years I’ve made an exception for the works of SA Cosby after being impressed by Blacktop Wasteland, which seems to be the book that got him attention from readers in general. Unfortunately, I’m beginning to suspect that book might have been a fluke; I didn’t end up reviewing it on the blog, but I found his follow-up Razorblade Tears so lacklustre that I couldn’t finish it. Having now read All The Sinners Bleed, I’m disappointed to report that the problems I had with Razorblade Tears are just as present in this one as well.

Shifting gears into a police procedural/murder mystery direction, All The Sinners Bleed stars Titus Crown, a former FBI agent who moves back to his small southern hometown to serve as Sheriff after an initially-mysterious traumatic incident that saw him leave the Bureau under murky circumstances. Growing up seeing the previous occupants of the office terrorise him and other black people of Charon county, Titus is determined to use the badge for good, change the system from the inside, etc.

That resolve is severely tested when a disturbed young man walks into the local high school and shoots a popular teacher dead in front of his class, before being killed himself by two of Titus’ deputies. Pulling on some threads during the subsequent investigation, Titus and his department make a horrifying discovery: good old Mr. Spearman and his young killer were both part of a group that was systematically kidnapping, abusing and sometimes murdering children and teens in the area, a group whose third member is still unaccounted for. As Titus closes in on him, the unidentified serial killer starts to go scorched-Earth on anyone who could identify him, leaving a trail of Hannibal-esque biblically-themed murder victims in his wake.

So this is very much riding on the wave of post-True Detective murder mystery fiction: grimy, southern small-town locale, local corruption, religious themes, ostentatiously gruesome murderer who has this cocoon of fiction built up around his killings, you’ve seen plenty of this in the last ten years.

Unfortunately, like a lot of similar media, All The Sinners Bleed feels like it’s going through the motions. Instead of Carcosa and the Yellow King stuff in True Detective, here we’ve got very standard biblical allusions to Caanites and the whole Curse of Ham thing that some racists like to harp on about. Instead of the more timeless evils that True Detective focused on, this book tackles ripped-straight-from-the-headlines themes about confederate statue protests and Charlotesville-style terrorism that, to be quite honest, already felt like they were behind the zeitgeist in 2023 when the book was published and seem positively archaic now. None of the themes the book tackles have become less relevant over time—quite the opposite—but their specific form has evolved, and that leaves the book feeling like its moment had passed before it even came out.

This sense of irrelevance might not be so acute if the themes were handled with any level of subtlety or nuance, but they’re not. One of the things that annoyed me intensely about Razorblade Tears is that it tried to tackle Big Issues like racism and homophobia, but did it with language and ideas borrowed from a Twitter activist’s timeline. The same is largely true of All The Sinners Bleed. Every idea and opinion is expressed with the thudding obviousness of someone trying to condense all of their talking points into a thread less than ten tweets long, preferably with absolutely zero room for misinterpretation so no one can use it as an excuse to come after them in bad faith. No allegory or theme or parallel is left for the reader to infer; everything is spelled out in plodding, stupefying detail.

I maybe could have forgiven this on its own, but the entire book is written this way. Every thought, emotion and observation that goes through Titus’ head is conveyed in the same heavy-handed manner, repetitively spelling out that Titus feels guilty due to his past and sees his pursuit of the killer as a form of atonement, over and over and over again. The few chapters where the narrative point of view leaves Titus and takes in the entire town make Stephen King’s “I am going to reveal to you the dark underbelly of this quaint American locale” chapters look subtle by comparison. Rarely will the book present a metaphor or allegory without either repeating it unnecessarily (this is an extremely common writing flaw these days, one I hate intensely) or over-explaining it.

Another thing All The Sinners Bleed shares with SA Cosby’s other books is its protagonist. Titus is, just like the main characters of Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears, a big chunky unit of a man, emotionally-alienated from his peers and loved ones, physically strong and adept at dishing out violence when the need arises but also more intelligent than most people he meets. Just like the protagonist of Blacktop Wasteland, he has a departed parent who he thinks about often and semi-hallucinates on at least one occasion. And just like those previous main characters he’s also fond of coming out with pithy one-liners, only Titus takes this trait into the level of self-parody: pretty much every chapter or section break is preceded by a downbeat quip regarding the situation at hand. A few times he even takes his sunglasses off and then puts them back on, like David Caruso in CSI Miami.

Yes, okay, Titus has his differences from the main characters of those previous books. He’s got his temper more in check and his self-loathing is more acute and inward-facing. But even still, in terms of physical characteristics, narrative voice (and literal voice for that matter), and semi-nihilistic worldview, he’s far too close to them for comfort.

Then we get to the actual murder investigation, which frustrated me. It’s one of those mystery stories I’ve encountered far too often which feels engaging and tightly-plotted until you isolate the specific clues that actually advance the investigation, at which point you realise how little the investigator’s actions actually advanced things. Titus gets handed the killer’s backstory via a (slightly too convenient) random encounter with a stranger, and the killer’s heritage comes through a familial DNA search carried out by someone else. The one clue that lets Titus zero in on his identity is found with the initial crop of remains that kick off the case, then sits dormant until an entirely unconnected event happens that lets Titus twig to its significance. This all feels unsatisfying, because the investigation advances through coincidences and disconnected side plots rather than through the actions of the principal investigator. Even worse, the killer turns out to be a very minor character who was only mentioned twice prior, meaning that when he was revealed as the murderer my reaction wasn’t “Oh, it’s him!” or “Of course, it all makes sense now!” but “Wait, who?”

Also, not to be one of those guys, but I think I spotted a plot hole. Titus’ investigation is focused on the seven black teenagers who the trio of criminals killed, but the video and photo evidence they find on Mr. Spearman’s phone indicates that they also abused a number of younger white children in their creepy murder dungeon. This fact seems to get quietly forgotten at around the mid-point of the novel. On one hand, that’s fair enough—the murders are the more serious crime, and they’ve provided a lot more evidence in the form of human remains and DNA.

On the other hand, at one point Titus mentions that he thinks he recognises some of the now-adult abuse victims around town but makes absolutely no attempt to speak to them even though they’re potential witnesses. This feels like a few important scenes got cut in editing or something, as enough of a point is made out of the idea that there are abuse survivors still living in town that it seems like it has to have been deliberate set-up for a pay-off that never comes.

As you may have gathered, the book touches on some Hot-Button Topics and seems to be trying to say something about activism in the modern age. Titus starts off with a (self-acknowledged) both-sides view of the clash between racists and anti-racists, as his position as sheriff means that he views both of the groups as problems to be solved, and his avowed goal of living up to the ideals of the badge means he can’t show preferential treatment to either, even though his personal sympathies are firmly with the anti-racists. Also, the racist activists are for most of the book at least acting predictably, whereas the counter-protestors have a tendency to muddle into situations at the worst possible time. I don’t think it’s invalidating the ideological position they represent to point out that mass protest movements, of all kinds, can be messy and chaotic and that when you get a large group of angry people together, you have to be prepared for the possibility that some of them might do things you didn’t want them to. I was fine with all of this; it’s taking a realistic, somewhat cynical look at the reality of protest and direct action, without trying to conclude that protest and direct action are bad in and of themselves.

My issue is with the specific characters chosen to represent the different sides. The counter-protestors are lead by a hip young preacher who feels like a very out-of-touch parody of The Modern Youth, and who the book is very unsympathetic towards…until this whole strand of the plot resolves itself, at which point it treats him like an okay dude with his heart in the right place, even though for most of the plot he’s been acting irrational and making every situation he blunders into worse.

And then there’s Titus, who ends the book with an act of law-breaking direct action of the type he’s been trying to prevent for the last thirty-three chapters. I don’t have any issue with this narratively—it’s a perfectly understandable place for his character arc to end—but thematically, it’s discordant in a way I don’t like. What the book seems to be saying is that protest and violent action are bad when stupid wimpy kids with their dreadlocks and their jeans do them, but it’s good and awesome when big smart middle-aged cool guys who all the woman are attracted to do it.

Am I suggesting there’s a bit of author self-insertion happening here? Well, no. But I’m also not not suggesting that. If someone was to tell me this was the case, I would not be surprised.

As has been the case before when it comes to my issues with SA Cosby’s novels, it’s the protagonist who’s the central problem, and I use “protagonist” in the singular because, as I’ve already established, it really does feel like these are all the same protagonist. These books just seem to be a little too in love with their quiet, brooding muscular smart-guy main characters. It’s kind of like Stephen King and his alcoholic writers, and just like when King went from using his self-inserts for searing self-criticism to making one of them the central pillar of his fiction’s reality, SA Cosby has, at some point, started buying into his ur-protagonist’s bullshit.