“I had all the girls, one after the other, but it was too easy, a little sickening.”

Lee Anderson, twenty-six years old, the son of a mixed-race woman, leaves his hometown after the death of his Black brother, lynched for being in love with a white woman.

He ends up in Buckton, a small town in the southern United States, where he becomes a bookstore manager. Tall, well-built, always ready to buy a drink, and an accomplished blues musician, Lee easily seduces most of the local teenage girls. Among a small local gang, desperate for alcohol but with a voracious appetite for sex, he leads a life of debauchery. All the while, he never loses sight of his true objective: to avenge his brother’s death.

Far removed from Boris Vian’s usual novels, this story is probably the most violent, the most raw, and at the same time the most representative of the “Vernon Sullivan” style. Through a harsh story where violent sexuality is omnipresent, Vian denounces the ambient racism and the precarious condition of Black people in the southern United States.