Nicole Cuffy’s novel O Sinners! is visceral and engrossing.
Literary Hub wrote of the book:
“While there have been quite a few novels approaching the subject of cult indoctrination lately, Nicole Cuffy’s literary marvel stands head and shoulders above the rest.”
In her own words, here is Nicole Cuffy’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel O Sinners!:
Music played a large role in the drafting of this novel. It was music that kicked off my research, and music kept me pulling forward as the plot developed, formed, came undone, and reformed while writing and through several rounds of revisions. Because of this, O Sinners! was an atmospheric novel for me to write. I felt very grounded in its emotional current due to the music that was playing in the background like a soundtrack as I was writing.
“Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
This was the song that got this book started. I heard it randomly while watching a television show, and though I had heard the song before, it hit me differently this time; I heard in it the voice of a frustrated generation. It prompted me to begin researching the Vietnam War. As I began this research, my characters began to form, and then my plot.
“A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke
When I think of the Black experience during the sixties, especially in the context of the Civil Rights movement, this is the chief song that comes to mind. As I was forming the characters that are in the Vietnam War sections of O Sinners!—namely, the four Black soldiers that are followed in that section—this was the song that worked as the undercurrent. This song has been important to me my whole life. I sing it to my children now.
“What’s Going On?” by Marvin Gaye
“What’s Going On” begins with the sounds of Black voices in community—men greeting each other, exchanging pleasantries in the slang of the early 70s. Then the cool drop of the bass and the blue notes of the saxophone slide in. It sounds like a city neighborhood, perhaps Gaye’s native DC, but speaks to the state of the world. In that way, it is both local and global. This was the music that helped me to form the cult leader of my novel, Odo. This was the music of his young adulthood, what would have shaped him.
“White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane
Aside from this song being evocative of the era in which it was released, its strangeness worked to fuel the religion my fictitious cult leader forms, the nameless. I wrote out this religion in the same notebook that contains the first draft of this novel, and this song’s stark, kaleidoscopic sound was a backdrop for that work.
“Backlash Blues” by Nina Simone
This was another song that helped me to develop the foundations of my cult leader. The music that would have raised him. When I hear this song, I hear the epitome of Black protest music. Nina Simone’s singular voice creates a portrait of a frustration in the face of the sharp systemic oppression of 1960s America. And yet there is a cheekiness and a hope in there as well. The song’s lyrics were written by Langston Hughes, who was a friend of Simone’s, and his poet’s voice is evident there.
“Handsome Johnny” by Richie Havens
The guitar in this song if controlled chaos, a deftly played whirl of notes that heads the song in before Havens’s voice enters and grounds it. Creating order out of chaos is one of the “commandments” of my fictitious cult. In this song, you can hear the human impulse to do just that. Havens creates the parallel between a soldier “marching to the Vietnam War” and the activists “marching to the Birmingham War,” or the Civil Rights marches in Birmingham. “Some of you are not even listening,” he admonishes toward the end of the song. Like the whirlwind of notes that propel this song forward, the noise and chaos of the time could be distracting, even misleading, if one is not even listening.
“Down to the River to Pray” by Alison Krauss
I heard this song for the first time in a class lead by my favorite high school English teacher, may he rest in peace. We were watching O Brother, Where Art Thou? And I didn’t think about it much until much, much later, when I was beginning to form this novel. In immersing myself in all things cult, I watched the movie The Other Lamb, which contained another version of this song. It inspired the title of my novel.
“Evil” by Howlin Wolf
This song set the atmosphere for the sinister undertone of the cult’s compound in the California redwoods, the Forbidden City. The song has an almost playful quality, even as it warns against “evil going on.” Much of the nameless’s creepiness is subtle. My protagonist, Faruq, the journalist investigating this cult, does indeed need to watch himself, as does the reader. Like Faruq, the reader might be seduced by the order of the Forbidden City, the playfulness of Odo, our cult leader.
“Me and the Devil Blues” by Robert Johnson
Robert Johnson is nearly a mythic figure in the blues world; he is supposed to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in order to be able to play the blues like he did. In this song, he holds hands with that rumor, tells his listeners that what they heard about him just might be true. No better song to embody the tango between a trickster and his next (potential) victim.
“Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix
The electric, dissonant drumming of the guitar that heads off this song means that, for me, this song is about disorientation, distortion. Disorientation in particular was one of the words I kept coming up with in my research into Vietnam War soldiers’ experiences, in my conversations with veterans, and in my forming the Vietnam sections of O Sinners! And distortion is the great enemy of the nameless, the thing that each follower is trying to combat in themselves and in the world.
“Where Did You Sleep Last Night” by Lead Belly
Deceptively simple, this song is the deep country, old country. Lead Belly’s slick voice croons, “Don’t you lie to me” to a blues melody almost as lilting as a waltz, as a lullaby. It reminds me of the saying, still waters run deep. Something that looks tranquil is not always so. There’s a seduction to the sway of this song, and yet once we’re in and listening, we find ourselves listening to a story of murder.
“Evil Blues” by Mance Lipscomb
This song is, in essence, a villain origin story. It speaks to the complexity any given person is capable of. It speaks to how, when pushed, a person can change, morph into something angry, something dangerous.
“Nothin’” by Townes Van Zandt
There is a kind of apathy to this song, but I associate it with grief. The lyrics suggest an exhaustion in the face of living. It is a kind of grief. And what might that grief do to someone? Could it wring them out? Could it turn their face toward nihilism? Could it make them vulnerable? These were the kinds of questions I asked when forming my investigative journalist, Faruq, who, while he is investigating this cult, is also grieving the loss of both of his parents, most recently his father.
“Sympathy for the Devil” by The Rolling Stones
I could not have written on the culture of the Vietnam War generation with encountering this song. Mick Jagger’s vocals are unrestrained, even coarse. The instrumentation is eclectic. It gave me a landscape of the late sixties to build off of. The song speaks to the duality of man, of course, but it also speaks to complicity, the vehicle for passive atrocities.
Nicole Cuffy is the author of Dances, longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Cuffy has an MFA from The New School and is a lecturer at the University of Maryland and Georgetown University. Her work can be found in the New England Review; The Masters Review, Volume VI (curated by Roxane Gay); Chautauqua; and Blue Mesa Review. Her chapbook, Atlas of the Body, won the Chautauqua Janus Prize and was a finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition. She lives in Washington, D.C.