Linda's Reviews > Razorblade Tears

"Don't do nothing you can't walk away from."

Grief and regret are strange fellows. They perch on the edge of your bed and persist with their low hum. Constantly and relentlessly.....needing attention day and night.

Razorblade Tears introduces us to an unlikely pair who call Red Hill County in Virginia their home. From all indications these two would never cross shadows on a sunny street. But tragedy binds them together in a profound way. Both of their sons, Isiah and Derek, were murdered in the cruelest of manners for being partners with a three year old daughter, Arianna. Heartless people define love in their own dynamics and stomp on everything that lies outside of their expected circle.

"Each drop felt like it was slicing his face open like a razorblade."

And each man cut themselves out of their sons' lives because they slipped into positions of judgment themselves. Ike, a Black business man owning a landscaping company, stands next to Buddy Lee, a divorced White man living in a trailer court with a powerful thirst for anything with an alcohol base. But they stand in a strange unity in front of the headstones at that funeral. Someone is going to pay. Someone has a hefty tab waiting for comeuppance.

S.A. Cosby sets it all out there. This is not a swift walk in the park. Razorblade Tears is raw, brutal, violent, and unbending in its telling. Prepare for that. But the dialogue splays out in real life form with these characters spewing out words reflecting bitterness and pain against a world that is so unforgiving. We will experience individuals displaying such territorial traits of evil passed down from generation to generation. And we will also view those who wake each day with the determination to make a difference in this darkness.

The writing is smooth at times and then jagged and piercing. "The heat was a living thing that reached out and touched him with a suffocating caress." Without question, you will feel this story long after the last page. Perhaps, moreso, for never leaving things unsaid and for recognizing the essence of the flesh and blood individual before you rather than the internal quest to follow the unachievable scaffolding of quick judgments. Razorblade Tears should not be missed.