King Comus

Past and present collide in this posthumous, semiautobiographical masterpiece by the author of Beetlecreek.

“One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.” —Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo

In the present day, a Black American expat to Rome named D. reconnects with his former Army friend, Tillman, and their former commanding officer, Joe Stabat, to organize a gospel summit for the singer Little Antioch. In the 1940s, as D. becomes enmeshed in Tillman’s large and boisterous family for the first time, Tillman recounts the story of his fabled ancestor King Comus. And in the early nineteenth century, master musician King Comus embarks on a grand journey to freedom from enslavement.

In this time-bending tale of survival and kinship, the product of more than twenty years of literary labor, William Demby weaves elements of the neo-slave narrative and Afrofuturism into a panoramic vision encompassing the forces of empire, race, gender, and religion.

William Demby was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 25, 1922, and attended college in Clarksburg, West Virginia, before enlisting in World War II and serving in Italy. He graduated from Fisk University in 1947 then moved abroad to Rome, where he spent the next two decades working as a novelist, journalist, and script translator and screenwriter for the Italian cinema. In the late 1960s, Demby joined the faculty at The College of Staten Island, dividing his time between the United States and Italy. His works include Beetlecreek, The Catacombs, Love Story Black, and King Comus. In 2006, he was the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died in Sag Harbor, New York, in 2013.

Melanie Masterton is a lecturer at the California Institute of Technology. Her scholarly work appears in journals including Modern Language Notes, Modernism/modernity, Pacific Coast Philology, California Italian Studies, and Italian Quarterly. William Demby is a key protagonist in her current manuscript devoted to a cohort of African American writers, artists, and performers in postwar Rome and their Italian creative circles. With Ugo Rubeo and James C. Hall, she guest-edited New Perspectives on William Demby, a special issue of African American Review.