In the Heat of the Light

During a brutally hot Atlanta summer, a graffiti crew deals with the aftermath of their biggest tag: an audacious defacement of the United States’ largest bas-relief monument to the Confederacy — Georgia’s Stone Mountain. As the crew unravels, two FBI agents attempt to untangle the knot of rage that led to the tag, getting in deep and ultimately entangling themselves.

Atlanta plays host to a lot of ghosts from the Civil War and Jim Crow to the slum clearance of the 1950s and the Civil Rights Movement to the 1996 Olympics. Stephen Kearse, a dynamic journalist and critic covering movies, music, and American history for media including New York Times Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, and Paste, calls down these ghosts to haunt modern Atlanta’s gentrification, Black Lives Matter, traffic, and trap music in this confronting and electric fiction debut.