In folklore, a Barghest is a huge dog with sharp teeth and claws; its appearance portends death. A different but no less frightening Barghest haunts Kayla Chenault’s These Bones. In this keen, smart, and unsettling debut novel, the residents of a besieged Black community known as the Bramble Patch seize moments of joy and redemption even as they are relentlessly ground down by racism, poverty, and the oppression of their wealthier and whiter neighbors in Napoleonville.

The novel begins with a warning. Dr. Wanhope Lyons, a retired doctor who senses death approaching, receives a letter from an eager archaeology student who would like to learn more about Wanhope’s childhood in the Bramble Patch, as preparation for a planned dig. Wanhope writes back: “Some people said that the Bramble Patch was built on the bones of its dead,” that “every house there had a foundation made of calcium and marrow.” “I think [my father] made it up to scare me,” Wanhope writes. “Trouble is, I’m not sure. So, if you can trace the lineage of a curse with your toolkit, I’d wager my soul against yours that the cornerstones of bones will ugly up your dreams for the dig site.”

The story is told mainly in retrospect, from multiple points of view. For all its troubles, the Bramble Patch in 1909, when the story begins, was a lively place “where the hot music lived and the hot women slept” and “rag-music peacocked and strutted out of every bordello, bar, and dance hall.” One of those bordellos belonged to a “big-toothed, sharp-clawed pimp, more tar than mammal and more dog than man.” Liable to sudden and ominous transformations, this man, known as the Barghest, could “switch between sweet lapdog and fell beast”; he might “greet a customer with a smile” only to be discovered “gnawing on the man’s bloated remains” a few minutes later. Chenault wryly complicates this character by placing him within his enabling context: “Despite having eaten a few of his customers, the Barghest had a very loyal crowd.”

Teasing out the contours of the Barghest’s predation, Chenault reveals a community repeatedly traumatized and, more than a century later, nearly wholly lost. The narration is by turns historical, archival, and even forensic, concerned to trace a sequence of harrowing events by any means available. These include fictional train timetables, old newsletters, and passages from history books, also fictional, complete with full citation information. Chenault’s use of fictional ephemera might, in lesser hands, seem gimmicky but here these disparate pieces are essential fragments of a vanishing world that demand preservation. Wanhope’s mother, Esther, herself a victim of the Barghest, functions as the neighborhood’s historian. Her orientation is appropriately dour: she talks of history as “a stampede” and “and when it had trampled over the bramble patch, only headstones would remain.”

Headstones — and the Barghest. Every time the narrative turns a corner, he grins malevolently from another doorway. At the center of this novel are the many crimes for which he bears responsibility, along with a small group of powerful white men like the Reverend, a hypocrite and a racist who holds Napoleonville outside the Bramble Patch in his thrall. The mechanics of Napoleonville further complicate the picture: the Barghest serves up Black women of the Bramble Patch to satisfy the sexual appetites of the white men of Napoleonville, and the children who invariably result from this arrangement struggle, sometimes violently, with the truth of their origins. The Barghest is a villain, but he stands for something larger than simply a malign force that moves a plot along: he personifies the violence of US history, if we can find the wherewithal to tell it fully and honestly.

In this polyphonic novel, community has a saving quality. The music of the Bramble Patch — blues, ragtime, spirituals — provides solace. As Wanhope’s mother, Esther, shows, it is possible to commune even with rivers and the dead. Wanhope, the doctor, finds comfort in the vocabulary of anatomy, allowing us to see the body, degraded as it so often is, as a source of grace in its most private spaces. The violence of the Bramble Patch limns its inhabitants to their exhausted sinews, but Chenault weaves its voices into a ringing whole.

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