When violence enters the routine
An essay about what follows an act of violence, and Marlon James’s forthcoming The Disappearers.
Newsletter - 26 July 2026
What comes after
Dead cattle at the foot of a cliff should halt a slaughterhouse. In Ana Paula Maia’s Of Cattle and Men, workers strip the carcasses for food before the police turn the deaths into accident and theft. The business expands. Our latest essay “Business continues” begins with that conversion and follows ten novels that look past violence to the habits that carry it forward. A prison calls cruelty discipline; a school protects its order after abuse. The essay asks who gets to name what happened, and who must live inside the approved account.
That question enters a rehearsal house in Marlon James’s The Disappearers. In 1988 Kingston, attackers break through the door during Havelock Titus’s staging of Fortune and Men’s Eyes. They kill Omar Joseph and blind Rainford Ellis. The rehearsal room offers company but gives the mob a target. James makes visibility both refuge and threat as he follows the survivors and the men who later vanish. Jordan’s revenge carries that logic further: he answers disappearance with forced visibility and learns the country’s method too well.
ESSAY
Business continues
Ten novels show institutions turning violence into routine. Their official accounts allow business to continue, leaving the people harmed to live with what those accounts omit.
BOOK
The Disappearers
Marlon James
Novel · 640 pages · Penguin Random House · September 2026
After a mob attacks a theatre rehearsal in 1988 Kingston, the survivors confront a country willing to erase gay men. The novel follows those who vanish and those whose revenge adopts the methods once used against them.