Don't get in the car

Okay. I am a supernatural horror fan, usual suspects, Darcey Coates, Bentley Little, Ambrose Ibsen. In my usual kind of book my quirky usually white heroine, a psychic investigator awakes in the house at 4am. She knew she should never have come here. The dream in which her long dead aunt warned her the house was a bad place comes back to her. But she is here to investigate. Up she gets. The basement door is open and she sees shadows moving down there. She hears a baby crying and the laughter of a maniac. The light does not work and she flips on her iPhone torch aware she has only 3% battery left. As she descends the steps, the door slams above her and her battery dies. In the dark the scratching begins. I'm so nervous I'm chewing my nails as I listen. My heart races. Will she get out alive?…Boyah doesn't need a haunted house, a dying iPhone or supernatural extras to scare the hell out of me. He's young. He's male. He's black. He's in America…No, all Boyah has to do is open his car door. It's not long before you realise the minute he pulls out, things will get nasty. Things could turn lethal. The siren will go and the blue lights begin flashing in his rear view mirror. It seems only the experience of surviving a civil war, allows him to get from A to B without any holes in him or any knees in the wrong place. By about the third time he gets in his car and my heart flips I'm yelling 'no don't do this to me!" like I might yell at the girl who goes in the basement, or strays off the country track in books by my usual favourites.
And this is exactly why this book is so important. A Somali-Omani friend recommended it. He has had similar experiences of racism in the US, UK and Middle East so I had an idea what was coming when Boyah got in his car. This book really conveys the perils and seeping dread, the unseen ghosts of established hate and power-craving. The sheer weight these pressures put on a human body is unbearable until he's got out of there and I can breathe again. But this is not supernatural or horror fiction, this is a memoir...it's had you on the seat edge for seven plus hours. Imagine if that is your reality. It's someone's every day experience. It's many other people's every day experience. It leaves you asking what it must be like, not knowing if your run to the grocery store or return from work is the trip that gets you beaten up, framed for something you didn't do or even killed,
There is so much more than just car drives gone wrong in this book. I hope it finds its way into the canon of American literature because it belongs there. It's so many journeys in one, physical, emotional, political and social. We are never just on one journey we are a composite of all the time and place we have encountered. Maybe the ultimate destination is human understanding and at whatever degree of it we can reach…what did I understand from it? No one's car journey in America, should read like a horror story. No one should have to know how to navigate life in 'peacetime' with the skills learned to survive war.

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