BEALZ: Prince of the Southside - A Review
BEALZ, Prince of the Southside, is what happens when a poet writes prose. Reading the book reminds one of jazz, a conflagration of sounds and rhythms that is a raw expression of the emotions of the musician. BEALZ feels like it should be read aloud, feels like it should be experienced as a group who are waiting to be swept up in the ideas and images of a narrative that is at once imperfect yet perfect in what it is attempting to achieve.
Narratives like this will always have difficulty in finding a home in large publishers because it bears little resemblance to what has already been published. BEALZ does not have an identifiable plot, though the story is definitely moving in a recognizable direction. At its core, it is about a child discovering parents who have been absent in their lives. Bealz, the titular character, has a mother who seems to be addicted to drugs and wanders the neighborhood in the streets of Chicago in a doped induced haze. His father, Askauri, is in prison. In this way, BEALZ feels like it follows familiar tropes that one finds in narratives written by black writers, whether it is poets, novelists, rappers, hip hop artists, play and screenplay writers, or lyricists.
The fact that Bealz, growing up in the worst kind of urban blight, is the son of royalty, is also a familiar trope in black popular culture. There is a fascination black people have to see themselves as descendants of kings and queens, and one finds this motif repeated in black music, movies, and literature. Yet BEALZ takes these familiar cultural markers and gives readers something that is so unique and so mind-blowingly creative, that one cannot help but marvel at the expansive scope of the imagination of the author, G.E. Moore. How does he conceive these far-flung worlds? How does he capture these enigmatic landscapes to be strewn on the page with a prose that feels like music when read?
Again, this book is more prose-poetry than simple prose narrative. Even the characters feel like poems, as there are their surface levels, but then there are layers upon layers to their existence. They have to be looked at, studied, and read more than once in order to fully comprehend who and what they are. The descriptive language of BEALZ is about as good as it comes, for abstract entitles conjured in the mind of the author become real in the imagination of the reader. You see Dakari, you hear Pickle-Me-Jack, you feel Peppin, you touch Majora Shitani, as if the characters are alive.
By the way, G.E. Moore has crafted some of the best monstrous villains since Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft. His antagonists are like Nyarlathotep, or Pennywise, or Shelob. They are entities that do more than render flesh from bone. They attack the emotions, feed on the sprit and mental energies of their prey. They are terrible to behold, and threaten to do awful things to those caught in their webs. In this way, BEALZ is like urban fantasy-horror. Trying to label this novel is as difficult as trying to see through the shifting realities of its characters. BEALZ isn’t meant to be contained in a neat box. It is intended to be experienced, for the reader to become one with the narrative.
BEALZ deserves to be read by all, but in-particular by African Americans, whose tragedies in America are painfully bared raw in this story that combines the fantastical with the brutal history of black America. It is easy to see this book becoming a best seller and winning literary awards, as the language is rich and unique, and the pillars that hold the narrative up are steeped in the reality of life in urban America.
