Review: Young God by Katherine Faw Morris

At the beginning of Katherine Faw Morris’ debut novel, Nikki, described as ‘thirteen forever’, sees her mother fall down a cliff into a river near their home. Her father, Coy Hawkins, doesn’t seem like the paternal type (we’re told early on that he ‘used to be the biggest coke dealer in the county’), so she is shipped off to a children’s home. Nikki escapes from the home and searches out her father, recently out of prison and living in a ramshackle group of trailers and buildings on the top of a hill, with a strange silent boy who may be Nikki’s half-brother, and another teenage girl called Angel, who he pimps out in motel rooms.

Nikki quickly becomes involved in her father’s various money-making schemes (prostitution, robbing drug dealers, wholesaling black tar heroin) and also witnesses his brutal revenge on a rival pimp who had crossed him. Frightened by his volatility, Nikki attempts to make herself useful, bringing him a girl, Renee, who should be able to fetch a high price, only to see her father rape and murder her. After this, she decides to take Hawkins on at his own game, eventually taking his place at the top of the pyramid.

There’s a pulp-y, b-movie feel to Young God. The narrative is linear, coming in short, sharp bursts, and the characters are not given to literary bouts of reflection. There are moments of elaboration, though. While murders and dismemberment are described with total emotional detachment, Nikki has an almost synaesthesiac connection with the world around her: a name is ‘shiny and bitter, like a licked coin’, while the vibration of a mobile phone makes her ‘veins shake’. This sensuality becomes heightened as drugs come to play a larger role in Nikki’s life. The smells of cocaine (‘cold and chemical, like the inside of a refrigerator’) and heroin (‘burned ketchup’) fill the house, and the narrative becomes fractured and paranoid, reality interspersed with dreams.  

The characters of Young God are barely connected to straight society at all. Even after Coy Hawkins has revealed the extent of his brutality to Nikki, she still retains a visceral fear of the DSS which prevents her from going back. We can only guess at how awful the state home was, if living with her father seems preferable. Occasionally there are references to politics (Nikki asking Coy if he became a pimp ‘because of the economy?’) or lines about religion (‘the old [churches] are brick. The ones that got pissed off and split off from them are in store-fronts. The ones that got pissed off and split off from them are in abandoned gas stations’), but this is no Breaking Bad style social satire. The majority of the action takes place in Coy Hawkins’ property on the top of the hill, and deals are done for profit or survival – there’s no moral element.

This is a revenge novel without a truly redemptive ending; Morris’ description of the final confrontation between Nikki and her father is described with the same unsensational tone as the rest of the book, denying the reader the sort of visceral rush designed to lend retrospective legitimacy to the scenes of abuse the female protagonist had suffered before. This is business as usual – there is no room for sentiment or catharsis. Morris’ brutal refusal to romanticise Coy Hawkins’ outlaw lifestyle is reminiscent of Tony O’Neill, while there’s even a hint of JT Leroy in the descriptions of Nikki’s relationships with alternately protective and threatening pimps (although Young God doesn’t have the same magical sensibilities as Sarah).

At 193 pages long (and many of those have only a paragraph of text on them), Young God is a short but intensely focussed debut novel. We never leave Nikki, or take any time to reflect on what is happening. The writing relies on the author’s ability to create a sense of momentum, and plunge the reader into Nikki’s world, as she rushes towards her future. This might not be as intricately designed as some of Granta’s recent output, but the effect is sharp and shocking, like a brick thrown into a pond.