'This Isn't New': Questions For Tochi Onyebuchi, Author Of 'Riot Baby'

The "riot baby" in Tochi Onyebuchi's slim, devastating new novel is Kev, born amidst the chaos of the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. Kev is the sort of character who's often reduced to a statistic, in books or outside them: He's young, he's black, he's in prison — while out in the world, his sister Ella is the one who wields mysterious, terrifying magical powers.

But Onyebuchi puts Kev at the center of the story, as a kind of conduit between the horrors of the past and a believably dystopian future. His life is hemmed in by structural and individual racism at every turn; Onyebuchi describes his encounters with predatory police officers with a chilling matter-of-factness.

Over the course of the book, we follow Kev from childhood to prison to release into a near-future version of Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood that's become a sterile corporate holding pen for parolees, where a tiny chip implanted in his thumb controls his entire life. (For a while. Kev's future — and Ella's — well,