John Vercher
“Some of the problems that we run into in this country and as human beings in general, is that we often think we have the answers, and talk like we have the answers, and we don't. If we would address some of these issues with more curiosity than certainty I think we'd be in a much better place, idealistic as that sounds.”
“The novel’s final pages will leave you breathless.”
“Vercher (After the Lights Go Out, 2022) masterfully builds a haunting tale of grief, family secrets, and unacknowledged crimes of racism that inevitably resurface. With dark humor, psychological suspense, ghost-story elements, and echoes of Percival Everett’s Erasure (the source of the film American Fiction), Devil Is Fine is a multilayered portrayal of one man’s struggle with his personal demons and a white society’s steadfast refusal to confront its own.”
“Vercher’s novel is gut-wrenching, but he leavens it with some humor; one of the narrator’s fellow bar patrons calls him names like ‘Colson Half-Whitehead’ and ‘Phony Morrison.’ His prose is self-assured…It’s an intelligent book that never loses its heart.”
“Vercher (Three-Fifths) strides back in the ring with the explosive story of a troubled Philadelphia MMA fighter whose career has stalled . . . expertly captures the brashness and discipline of combat sports as well as the harsh realities of the fighting life, delivering all of it in a swiftly paced triumph complete with a surprising one-two punch of a conclusion. This is simply brilliant.”
“Shrewd and explosive.”
“Riveting.”
John Vercher is the author of three novels, most recently, Devil is Fine (Celadon, 2024) an IndieNext pick that was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It was also a TIME Magazine 100 Must-Read Book of 2024. His other novels are After the Lights Go Out (Soho Press, 2022), a Booklist Editors' Choice Best Book of 2022 and a CrimeReads Best Crime Novel of 2022, and Three-Fifths (Agora, 2019), named one of the best books of 2019 by the Chicago Tribune. It was nominated for the 2020 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and The Strand Critics’ Award for Best Debut Novel. His nonfiction work has been featured on WBUR and NPR, and has appeared in Entropy Magazine, CrimeReads, Booklist, LitHub, and Men’s Health.
John currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Monmouth University (where he also served as the ‘24-’25 Artist-in-Residence) and core faculty at Randolph College’s low-residency MFA program in Lynchburg, Virginia. John also served as the inaugural Wilma Dykeman Writer-in-Residence at the University of North Carolina Asheville.
In an interview about Devil is Fine, John was asked why he chose to not to name his narrator. He responded: “There's a tradition in Black literature for unnamed narrators that I think is very intentional. I'm thinking of writers like Maurice Carlos Ruffin, obviously Ralph Ellison. There's this idea, I think, that when you're questioning your identity or your identity is questioned by outsiders, you eventually get to a point where you begin to question your own identity. You start to wonder who you are. And so it made perfect sense for me to have a protagonist who was going through those kind of struggles about who he is, both as a father, both as a Black man, both as a biracial man, to not have a name because he himself doesn't know who he is.”
John lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and two sons.
“Mesmerizing.”
“Short, lucid and harrowing.”
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