Read of the Month: “The Walls Are Closing In On Us” by Joshua Trent Brown

What would your life look like if it were played back for you in your final moments, watched from a lofty vantage like heaven, or the more oblique angle of purgatory? Would you see yourself being carried along, pinged from vertex to vertex as the polygon of your life develops? Could you name the forces that were driving you?

For George, protagonist in Joshua Trent Brown’s stunning debut novel The Walls Are Closing In On Us, (Malarkey 2026) life has always felt predestined, bounded and channeled by the violent facts of racism and poverty—the closing-in walls of the book’s title, which perpetually constrain George and force him onward.

We meet George when he is already “deader’n hell,” stabbed and snake-bitten and bleeding out his epic life story, in a limited third-person narration that adopts the whimsically long sentences of George’s own breathless vernacular. Humble, observant, and likable, George is a narrator well aware that he is running out of time—a fact made clearer by the series of ghostly visitations that pepper the linear storyline.

We learn that George’s circumstances were troubled from the start. Half-Choctaw and half-white, George learns racism, violence, abandonment, and social exclusion from a young age. The loss of his loving Mammy, a woman whose laugh “could bring flowers back to life,” leads George to the first of many surrogate homes, with two Choctaw brothers; soon he loses these ties as well. His subsequent adventures include a whirlwind visit to the Mississippi State Fair, and adoption by a traveling circus. For a time, he finds a home within this ultimate symbol of motion, surreality, and transience.

A chorus, an anthem, a mantra here, is that in life there is no going backward, only forward; events conspire more than once to compel George to hit the road, but he never visits the same place twice. The ephemeral whispers of oracle-like supporting characters remind him to keep moving:

“It may not be a better place, but there is always another place…if the ties are cut on the place you’re in, do not try to put them back together. Go find the next,” intones an elderly woman inside the circus tent.

It is a message he internalizes, though he cannot articulate why.

Inside all the movement, the fleeing, there are indeed moments of safe harbor. At intervals George is met by souls—some of them fellow voyagers—who catch him for a spell and build him back up, and on occasion try to hold him awhile before launching him forward with food, money, or an address where he might next land.

Tragedy is always lapping at George’s heels. He tells his story as his body is physically crumbling; we learn, though, that this body has been crippled by asthma since childhood. Around him, too, beloved bodies break—from snake bites and infections, stabbings and suicides, guns, and the deadly claws of wild cats. Death often seems meaningless, a waste, an afterthought. George loathes his own capacity for violence, though all signs point to these acts being inevitable, almost required of him.

Amid all the uncertainty, unfamiliarity, and injustice he faces, George finds consistency in, and places his trust in the wild world. Violent as it can be—we walk with George through storms and floods, and with trepidation and wonder through mountain lion territory—the forest also saves George, hiding him and ferrying him from one life chapter to the next. Rivers, too, seem to inspire and rejuvenate, reflecting the intense and constant flux that characterize his life and this book.

The Walls Are Closing In On Us is an ample, elegant, compelling read. It is a timeless odyssey, a rapturous series of painful encounters with brief moments of profound sweetness. We feel, viscerally, the suffocating conditions that propel George ever-forward, and while we recognize his probable demise from the beginning, we never stop rooting for his triumphant release. We realize it’s the compression that shapes and colors him—still, we yearn to know who he is, and who he might have become, if those walls never did close in.

Joshua Trent Brown

Joshua Trent Brown is a writer from a small town in North Carolina that you’ve never heard of. Trent has short fiction in a bunch of cool publications that you’ve maybe heard of. You can find him most anywhere.