A heroine who’s paid to impersonate the dead?
Monica Brashears’s gothic debut novel, “House of Cotton,” opens with an ending: 19- yearold Magnolia sits at the funeral of her grandmother, Mama Brown. Mama Brown was Magnolia’s only family left after her dad died and her mother abandoned her as a child, which means Mama Brown’s death marks not just the end of a life but also the end of the only support Magnolia had.
More misfortunes roll in from there: Magnolia’s predatory landlord, Sugar Foot, who bought Magnolia’s family’s house from under them generations ago, reminds her that rent is due but offers to “work a little something out” to cover it. Magnolia is too busy to worry; she has to go to her night job at a local gas station. That evening, she has a run- in with a well- dressed white man who comes in asking for a bathroom, his hands covered in blood. As he’s leaving, he tells Magnolia she could be a model, gives her a business card and disappears into the night. When Magnolia finally gets home after work, Sugar Foot shows up again, this time to tell Magnolia, as he moves in close to touch her thigh, that when he r grandmother was her age, she was “selling sugar” to make ends meet . Then the story cuts, and next we see, Magnolia is scrubbing her body in the shower.
It’s at this point that I began to steel myself. Haven’t we heard this story before? The story of how young Black people, down on their luck, have to resort to the unthinkable just to survive? There’s power in these stories, yes; they’re probing and unfortunately all too real; but haven’t these displays of contemporary Black pain become so … prevalent? Aren’t there other Black stories to be told?
Brashears seems to anticipate our exasperation, because this is where the novel shifts into something delightfully unusual.
At wit’s end, Magnolia decides to give the modeling gig a try. She goes to the address on the business card only to find it’s not a studio but a funeral parlor. The mysterious man, whose name is Cotton, tells her the job is part of a new service the parlor offers: For a lucrative fee, Magnolia will impersonate deceased people so that grieving families who never got proper closure can say goodbye to their loved ones. Magnolia won’t just stand in for the dead, she’ll temporarily become them. This is the cutting edge of grief services, and Magnolia has the opportunity to become rich.
That’s just the setup. “House of Cotton” is packed with plot: As a hobby, Magnolia has anonymous sex with men, only orgasming when she sees fear in their eyes; Magnolia moves into the funeral parlor, where Cotton and his business partner ply her with alcohol as their assignments become increasingly demanding; Magnolia starts seeing Mama Brown’s ghost; Magnolia learns that Cotton has an almost necrophiliac obsession with dead people; Mama Brown’s ghost begins to deteriorate, assaulted by a malevolent force with designs on Magnolia; and more.
It’s a lot, and occasionally it feels as if the novel meanders — story lines emerge and then fall away, superseded by yet another narrative development. But it’s a testament to Brashears’s enchanting storytelling that the deluge of plot doesn’t overwhelm the book. Just the opposite: The cascading waves of unsettling encounters and unexplained phenomena imbue it with the thrilling energy of possibility. As the story developed, it felt like anything and everything could happen next. The narrative doesn’t build up as much as it pulls readers down, into an ever- deepening pool of eeriness and tension. Reading “House of Cotton” felt like riding a roller coaster in the dark — you may not know where it’s going, but you delight in every twist, turn and jolt.
As the plot thickens, so do the questions the novel raises: What does support look like? To whom is it offered and why? At what cost does it come, and how do you step away when the price is too high? “House of Cotton” meditates on these moral dilemmas in fresh, haunting ways.
There is a word commonly used to describe books like this: gritty. Fair enough. “House of Cotton” is unafraid to peer at the unsavory minutiae of getting by. But for this novel, I’d add a few other labels too: magnetic, singular and completely unforgettable.