Late Night/Early Morning Thoughts

on Juliet Escoria’s Black Cloud/Witch Hunt

I first read

Juliet Escoria

’s Black Cloud the year it originally came out via the great and unfortunately late CCM publishing house. I was on a book tour, a long tour (it seemed like decades), and life felt very slow. This was 2014. Tour hit New York City three times, because like I said, it was a long tour. A lot of that was downtime. Subways. Parks. Apartments. Slow because 2014 was slow in a way 2023 is not. Slow—and also summer-slow, which is a special kind of slow.

My most vivid memory of the New York dates is of a night at Mellow Pages. (Also late and great.) The reading was quiet—just me and Marc Saviano. Not a lot of people there. But it was special in the way that a 2014 slower-life fiction reading could be. Lucy Shaw was there with her French boyfriend. I remember liking them. The Mellow Pages guys Matt Nelson and Jacob Perkins were very nice and easy to talk to. After the readings, or before, I don’t know, Kristin Felicetti from the Bushwick Review did some sort of contest. I don’t recall the exact details or specifications of how you won a thing, but I won a CCM-era galley copy of Black Cloud.

In 2014 I was touring behind my book Caveworld which came out a few months prior. It was (is) a book set mostly in San Diego and it dealt with (mostly) sex, love, and drugs. This was my second book set in San Diego and at the time I heard a lot from people along the lines of “You’re writing about San Diego like it’s New York City or Paris. What are you doing? You can’t romanticize San Diego.” Black Cloud immediately hit me because it was also mostly set in San Diego and concerned itself, at least on an external level, with sex, drugs, and love.

I don’t like the term “seen” in the sense of “I felt seen” or “This makes me feel seen,” but it fits here. Black Cloud with its pitch-dark, brutal depiction of San Diego life made me feel seen. Or, rather, made me feel more resolute in writing about the things and places I wanted (and still want) to write about. (“My kind’s your kind,” and the such.)

Back from tour, I emailed Juliet to tell her how hard it hit. A few years later I got a copy of her poetry collection Witch Hunt from the (also late-great) small press Lazy Fascist because Pioneers Press had been distributing Black Cloud for a while and wanted to carry Witch Hunt. I messaged Cameron Pierce from the press many times and never heard back. Soon after that, Lazy Fascist was done. Which was a shame. They did powerful things. (The powerful things will remain.)

Last week I got back from another book tour and found not one but two copies of the CLASH Books’ galley for the Black Cloud/Witch Hunt combo release in my mailbox. This is not a book review because I’m not a journalist or a critic. So, take this for what you will—a late night/early morning book report from an ex San Diego (also, ex) kid, long time gone.

Black Cloud and Witch Hunt are everything I want from modern literature—humor, darkness, bravery, original thought, rhythm, musicality. To see my hometown echoed so well in stories set on beaches and in dark apartments is a grounding feeling. (There are more places in this expanded edition, but I feel like I know those places too.) The prose and poetry is lean, scary, funny, and true. The sentences vibrate and shed sparks. They’re cruel, vulnerable, and very often perfect.

I love zero-bullshit lines like “Christmas happened” and reading about Tijuana in the sense that my friends and I knew Tijuana. I love “He wasn’t much besides his job.” I love “He would come home from work and find me there, silent and smelling of blood.” I love, “The sun was low in the sky and thick yellow like tree sap, that gorgeous time of day before the sun begins to set.” I love “We are braided around each other like snakes.”

This next line hits me like a car because I know how it is to live like this: “Some days I don’t wake up till the sun’s going down and my role in things weighs down so darkly it nearly chokes me.”

Right, so, this isn’t a review, I’m not a reviewer, etc, etc. But I feel like I get this collection and I want to tell you that you should buy it when it comes out on Tuesday. Do not waver or delay. This is what you want.

-Adam Gnade, Ruby Teeth farm, 4am, November 10^th, 2023