Liz Rocher, the Black narrator of Adams’s Jackal (Bantam), returns to her hometown only to discover that a serial killer of Black girls, whose crimes she survived there, is still active
Where did the idea for Jackal come from?
It started mostly from my love for urban legends. I often find that urban legends, more so than folklore or mythology, are about how a community tries to answer an unanswerable question. And when I thought about some of the unanswerable questions that were floating around for me—figuring out, or thinking about the optics of who goes missing, who gets the media coverage, and all that—it isn’t really an answerable question. The question in Jackal is, when a Black girl goes missing, who looks for her? So I tried to make an urban legend or my own folklore, so to speak, around that. And everything in the book spiraled out from there.
Liz wrestles with survivor’s guilt, but she refuses to accept victimhood. How did you see her role in the story?
Liz started off as a large part of myself, but as the story got bigger and things progressed she took on a life of her own. It was important to me to have a protagonist who is flawed and vulnerable, not perfect, and in some ways the exact opposite of the kind of person you want to be solving the mystery. I’m really tired, especially when it comes to Black female protagonists, of seeing them depicted as perfect—they’ve got it together, they’re strong, they’re spunky, they can do everything. And
I thought, what if she’s a bit of a hot mess? She goes through what she does not just to solve the case and save the day, but also to save herself.
What can you say about the effort in the novel to erase the history of its Black community, or at least to foster an alternate narrative for its experience?
It’s a big part of Jackal, and being specific about the town, and being specific about the time period of the book—set in Johnstown, Pa., in the summer of 2017. It’s this whole idea of “there’s nothing new under the sun.” This has been happening, it keeps happening, and that danger that if you don’t know your history you’re doomed to repeat it.
