Sky Full of Elephants

April 1, 2024

Award-winning author and creative director Campbell makes his full-length novel debut with a speculative postapocalyptic story. One day all the white people in the U.S. drowned themselves. Charles, a Black man who served time for a wrongful conviction and is now a professor, reunites with his estranged 19-year-old daughter, and they embark on a journey to search for answers. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from July 29, 2024
Campbell (Violet in Some Places) delivers a captivating near-future fantasy set one year after every white person in the United States walked in droves to the nearest body of water and drowned themselves. In the wake of “the event,” people of color emancipated themselves from debt, jobs, prison, and other forms of bondage and reshaped the country. Charlie Brunton, who left prison (the details and merits of the case against him come out later) and has a new life with a nice house in a Washington, D.C., suburb, observes, “In the absence of white people, the American identity moved forward, but with a handicap, limping under the weight of old ways and a crippled sense of self.” The plot gets underway when Charlie receives a call from his estranged 19-year-old daughter, Sidney, whose white mother drowned and who has been hiding in Wisconsin since the event. She convinces Charlie to accompany her to Alabama, where she believes some of her white relatives may be hiding out. Campbell’s depiction of their trek across an altered and occasionally nightmarish Southern landscape evokes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and he caps the narrative with fascinating revelations about the cause of the event. This stunning allegory will spark much discussion. Agent: Byrd Leavell, UTA.

August 1, 2024
Charles Brunton and his daughter, Sidney, live in a world rebuilding itself after a mass-death event. One day, for no obvious reason, all of the white people walked into the nearest body of water. For Sidney, this meant watching her white mother and stepfamily disappear into a large lake in Wisconsin. For Charles, who is Black, it meant he was released from prison for a crime he didn't commit. Sidney, who has never met Charles, calls him for help getting to Alabama, where there is a rumored colony of white people who survived. The journey Sidney and Charles undertake is not easy; at one point, they end up at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and Charles worries about where he will be able to charge his electric car. The thought experiment of the novel is fascinating, and the jump into a space without the many racist systems in place--and the people who benefit from them--is illuminating. This will be an uncomfortable novel for some, but it's a truly powerful and riveting story that could make for some very interesting book-discussion conversations.

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August 15, 2024
A professor and his daughter navigate a new America where all white people have died by suicide. "They killed themselves," explains Charlie Brunton, the narrator of Campbell's high-concept novel. "One morning, every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned." Charlie is a Black man who's served time in prison, wrongfully convicted of rape; after the mass suicide of white people, he became a professor at Howard University, trying to make sense of a country with no real government or systems: "Only a fragile structure remained...." Charlie gets a phone call from his daughter, Sidney, born to the white woman he was accused of raping, asking him to drive her from her home in Wisconsin to Alabama, where she's heard that some surviving white people are living. Sidney has internalized racism, opining that "the world got left to the heathens" and lamenting her physical similarities to her Black father. Charlie and Sidney enlist the help of a pilot to get them to the South, eventually ending up in Mobile, where they encounter a new society that neither of them expected and learn what was behind the mass suicide of white Americans. Campbell's novel starts off fairly strong--it's undoubtedly an interesting thought experiment--but goes off the rails quickly, sunk by the author's often too-florid prose and unrealistic dialogue. Sidney's transition from self-hating to enlightened is forced, and aside from the two protagonists, the characters are purely functional. This book reads less like a novel and more like an extended treatment for a television series. A plodding novel from a talented writer.

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