'Black & White: A Novel' by Lewis Shiner

A Novel

Lewis Shiner

Subterranean Press: 368 pp., $25

LEWIS SHINER'S body of work brings to mind a coloring book whose margins have been gleefully scrubbed away by an entire box of crayons. "Frontera," his 1984 debut novel, cast the author as a pioneer of cyberpunk; "Slam" (1990) explored the heady mixture of anarchy and skateboarding; and "Say Goodbye" (1999) drenches an otherwise conventional rise-and-fall story of a young musician with offbeat elements. Even in his comics work, Shiner shied away from caped crusaders, instead concocting "The Hacker Files," an exciting 12-part series featuring a freelance programmer moonlighting as a world-saver.

There can be a flip side to the creative freedom afforded by the torching of category lines: involuntary exile to the publishing tundra. It looked as if Shiner had been confined to that very permafrost until recently. A thawing was signaled by a graphic novel newspaper column; the "Fiction Liberation Front," an online repository of his publications; and now, his first novel in nearly a decade.

Once more, Shiner confounds expectations: Musical motifs are replaced by cries of protest, the offbeat traded for brutal realism, quotidian concerns superseded by pressing issues of race, class and family. "Black & White," as the title suggests, is painted on a broad canvas of stark contrasts and big themes, but the book doesn't suffer under the weight of its ambition.

The novel's quiet start introduces Michael, an Austin, Texas-based fledgling comic book illustrator who, at age 35, thinks himself "too old . . . to spend this much time with his parents" even as his career and romantic prospects leave him with limited options. The terminal cancer diagnosis of Robert, his father, and Robert's insistence on spending his dying days in Durham, N.C., give Michael a new purpose and bring him back to his birthplace, where he will hear his dad's last confession: involvement in a murder four decades ago in the heart of the once-bustling black Durham neighborhood of Hayti, which has lain fallow ever since, after deeply embedded racial hatred brought it down in flames during a riot.