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Looking at the unreadable trash that usually makes up the Christmas bestseller lists every year, my general thought is, “I wouldn’t want to have received any of those books as a present.”

This sentiment in mind, I wondered what text might end up being this year’s most dumpstered offering. It may well be Taylor Swift’s new, strangely self-published (and therefore ineptly edited) $40 coffee-table tour book, which is apparently so littered with amateur typos as to be virtuwally unreedabble. Reportedly, on one page it actually goes so far as to describe Swift as a “talented singer,” an error so severe it makes the Sinner’s Bible look a model of exactitude.

However, my own bet is placed very firmly upon the new novel Sky Full of Elephants by a hitherto-unknown first-time author named Cebo Campbell. To judge by descriptions and extracts, this is definitely the kind of thing that, if you unluckily received it inside your own stocking on December 25, you’d want to pulp it yourself inside a Kenwood mixer immediately—at least if you’re white.

Campbell’s Word Soup
Imagine, if you will, a white man sending in a manuscript to a major publisher whose plot concerns all the black people in America abruptly overdosing on fentanyl overnight, and the brave and better new world the remaining whiteys then contrive to build for themselves once shorn forever of all the walking racial deadweights dragging them down, economically and socially. It wouldn’t even get the courtesy of a rejection slip. A black man named Cebo Campbell does the same, but with all the white people committing self-genocide instead, and he gets a deal with Simon & Schuster.

On the publisher’s website, Simon—or possibly his good friend Schuster—calls the consequent white-free world “a truly post-racial America.” Yes, because the author has just killed off all of one entire race in it. Is this a “post-racial America” in the same sense as Hitler once dreamed of there being a “post-Jewish Germany”?

I’m not accusing the author of holding any literal genocidal intent toward Caucasians, obviously; without naive, rich, white, publishing-world liberals falling over themselves to publish screeds like this, Cebo Campbell may not have any authorial career at all. But again, I do find it hard to imagine a novel about, say, a Jew-less America ever being accepted by a major publishing house. Especially not one called Simon & Schuster.

Anyway, here’s the in-house blurb summary:

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.

That must have been proofread by the same semiliterates who edited Taylor Swift’s new Christmas gift book; just look at how they manage to incorrectly capitalize the first letter of the word “Black” there, but continually neglect to do so with the word “white.”

Novel Gazing
The webpage promoting “this astonishing debut novel…about healing and self-actualization” also features a “Reading Group Guide” of hot talking points for purchasers to confer with one another about following the final chapter. One suggestion is that readers “Discuss the concept of a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America as portrayed in the novel.” Likely readers of the thing probably discuss little else anyway.

Naturally, the website also features “RAVES AND REVIEWS” from critics, all of whom have names suggesting that, were they to be found within the novel’s pages, they would not be entering into a watery mass racial grave themselves anytime soon.

For Sidik Fofana, the book is “something completely woke and utterly satisfying”; nice to know the long literary tradition of poetic antithesis, as with Petrarch’s famously contradictory “cold fire,” is still going strong. Mateo Askaripour, author of something called Black Buck, and probable speechwriter for Kamala Harris, calls the work “a debut that dares us to tap into frequencies of freedom, to view ourselves as what we truly are and always have been: beings full of light worthy of love.”

Asale Angel-Ajani, a woman so committed to the written word she has named herself alliteratively, says “Sky Full of Elephants is a thrilling, original work that allows us to look deeply at each other and ask if ‘white ain’t an idea no more,’ what are the possibilities for the idea of black?” I notice Angel-Ajani is author of a previous novel called A Country You Can Leave, a description that, she may be interested to learn, even applies to America, if she hates living there so much.

Please Avert Your Gaze
Another review elsewhere is by someone called Serena Puang, which is not so much a name, more the noise an elastic band makes. Once again, this sudden sci-fi appearance of a whiteless world is predictably great, especially for someone with a name like Puang:

Writing a world where all the White people die is one of the only ways Campbell can force readers to picture a Black community in contemporary America that is not defined against a White community/their structures of power but as a force to be reckoned with in itself—with its own energy, traditions and drama worth writing about.

Such flights of literary fancy finally allow black people to “have their own narratives outside of racial conflict and the White gaze.” The best way for white (not White—that’s another typo) people to achieve this aim, I would suggest, is by them not reading it.

However, chides Puang, “This isn’t a book just for Black people, this is a book that forces readers [i.e., white ones] to confront their internal biases: If one can’t imagine a loving, harmonious, Black utopia, why not?”

Possibly because one is already sadly aware of the prior existence and history of South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Congo, Uganda, Haiti, and about a dozen equally chronically misgoverned others? (Cebo himself openly admires Haiti, though…)

A Chapter of Misfortune
Maliciously refusing to free Campbell’s black protagonists from the evil, soul-melting power of my own personal frost-white gaze, I decided to read a free online extract of the first chapter, which begins with the haunting refrain:

THEY KILLED THEMSELVES.
All of them. All at once.

Who did? The readers?

The first line of the book proper is this: “We unsealed the jails first.” Of course, now that all the white people are dead, federal prisons’ sole remaining inmates are black men. This is as opposed to the situation immediately beforehand, when only 99 percent of them were. Dusky relatives arrive “swinging bolt-cutters” to “liberate” their kin, a task that proves easy as “no one stood guard anymore,” all prison officers being white, as the whole American carceral system self-evidently only exists to oppress innocent black males.

Alongside white people themselves, the entire systemic governing apparatus of whiteness vanishes from this Earth like Nineveh and Tyre likewise, particularly capitalism: “All banks closed down. Their silent, towering buildings became mausoleums, having been worshipped long enough.” Did all the Jews kill themselves too, then?

At the beginning of George Orwell’s competing future sci-fi world of 1984, the clocks are famously “striking thirteen.” In Sky Full of Elephants, the change is even more profound, time itself being but another false invention of white capitalism: “Ask the time and folks just looked up at the sky, mumbling, ‘Quarter ‘til,’ because gone was the appraiser of hours into wages. Gone was the [white capitalist] gaze evaluating for its resource every minute ticking inside a body.”

With no more ticking inside bodies going on, evidently all the Muslims have topped themselves as well.

With every last honky lying bloated and fish-eaten in the sea, many blacks “were quietly contented seeing the horror as penance” for the Aryan race’s past sins of slavery, imperialism, and 1,001 assorted microaggressions. Soon blacks are shedding their slum housing and moving into dead whites’ more luxurious suburban homes before taking ownership of their material possessions wholesale, like bipedal hermit crabs. I guess this counts as reparations?

Black Goes Green
One good man freed from jail—in the inevitable movie, he will be played by Morgan Freeman—is Charlie Brunton, a genius in the field of eco-friendly green electricity, who swiftly goes “from prisoner to professor” by taking over a dead white teacher’s vacated role at college. Here, so many of Charlie’s students are black, I can only assume all the Asians are now dead via hara-kiri too.

Naturally, Morgan Freeman—I mean Charlie Brunton—is so avuncular and all-wise that, amidst teaching his classes all about solar panels, he also takes the time to impart some of the more important moral and social lessons in life, via gnomic utterances like “I suppose anything sounds righteous when you pay it enough respect.” I think Charlie is talking about whiteness when he says these dismissive words, but really it could also apply to so many sainted black people these days, too, couldn’t it?

“Mr. Brunton be preaching!” yells one of his students in sheer delight. So be Mr. Campbell.

As far as I can tell, Professor Brunton then receives an unexpected phone call from his long-lost daughter, who had previously assumed herself to be white, but now finds she can’t be, as she hasn’t felt compelled to pointlessly drown herself to atone for the former existence of cotton plantations. The two agree to meet up together and wander throughout the strange new land of Black America on a father-child road trip billed as being akin to that depicted in Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, only presumably with even more cannibals in it.

The Elephant Man
Who is Cebo Campbell, the man behind the pen? Nothing less than “an award-winning multi-hyphenate creative” based in New York and London, where he heads up the PR agency Spherical, which promotes the world’s top-end hotel brands. “I feel I have to write,” Cebo explains. But why? “The reason is simple: representation.” Not sheer talent, love of language, or having anything worthwhile or interesting to actually say, then?

Despite being employed for PR work by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Campbell’s chief creative inspiration is not the Bard, but the 1986 teen comedy movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which a preppy white boy played by Matthew Broderick skips school and goes on a series of barely legal adventures that do not ultimately culminate in him being shot dead for suspicion of trespassing by an oppressive, gun-wielding, white vigilante enforcer of the law, as once happened to poor young black Trayvon Martin. Says Cebo:

I often tell the story of Ferris Bueller; a kid who decides to skip school and, on charm alone, steals a car, impersonates a cop, drinks underage, tampers with computers, and at every step exposes his best friends to peril, only to go home and fall asleep with his mother to kiss him into sweet dreams. I asked myself if Ferris were Trayvon Martin, how might that story end? I know the answer. So do you.

But just imagine if, one fine morning, black America really did wake up to find all other competing races dead, and themselves in sole possession and control of the land, even its army, its space program, and its nukes. How might that particular story end? I know the answer. So do you. But any book attempting to explain so certainly wouldn’t get published by Simon & Schuster.