People Like Us
Jason Mott situates American gun violence and Black identity within mirrored narratives that question whether violence can ever be dislodged.
Kindle Edition · 270 pages · 2025
On Portability of Violence
The gun sits in the bedside drawer. It crosses borders. It hangs in the Seine, refusing to sink.
In Jason Mott’s novel People Like Us places American gun violence, grief and Black identity inside two parallel narratives: Soot, a grieving father in North Carolina, and an unnamed American writer moving through Europe after a stabbing. The novel does not ask whether violence can be escaped. It asks whether it ever loosens its hold.
Soot lives in the aftermath of his daughter Mia’s suicide. School safety briefings, campus protocols and statistical thinking shape his fear. The gun occupies domestic space as both reassurance and accusation. Protection and threat share the same drawer.
The unnamed writer travels through wealth, recognition and European elegance, shadowed by a figure named Remus. Race does not dissolve with distance. Status does not neutralise exposure. Entry into elite space changes nothing fundamental. The American lens remains.
The two strands run in parallel without early resolution. They do not rush to meet. Time fractures. Mia appears as child and as dead teenager within the same emotional frame. Remus shifts between presence and projection. Agency remains unsettled.
The organising object is the gun. It passes from safeguard to danger without altering its form. When the unnamed narrator throws it into the Seine, it does not sink. It hangs. Suspended. Refusing disappearance. Release does not equal removal.
The most forceful scenes are domestic. Parents watching a mandatory school safety video before enrolment. A child calmly declaring she would survive an attack. A father calculating probabilities. The horror lies in how procedural it sounds.
The structure circles rather than advances. Mirrored identities and blurred agency create disorientation. At times the ambiguity—around Remus, around the stabbing—thickens mood but thins narrative drive. The refusal to resolve is deliberate. Violence in this book does not climax. It persists.
The gun remains visible. The characters move. The structure fractures. Nothing fully lifts.