Conjuring Toni: Review of P.C. Verrone’s Rabbit, Fox, Tar

Sullivan Summer Under Review:Rabbit, Fox, Tar. P.C. Verrone. Catapult, June 2026. “To call Original Hill a place alone,” writes P.C. Verrone in his debut novel, Rabbit, Fox, Tar, “would have done it a disservice, for Original Hill was a dream. It was—its residents assumed—the only dream.” Those residents include city council rivals Lucky Foote and Eugene Fox; unrelenting protesters; and a strange girl with an “incredibly dark complexion,” Baby, who appears on the garden wall of the house, 1 Orchard, at the peak of the hill. How this girl arrived in the neighborhood, what Foote and Fox represent to the community, and just what the protesters are protesting are the mysteries that will carry through the novel, a surrealist reimagining of Joel Chandler Harris’s 19th century “Uncle Remus” stories with the haunting echo of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I can imagine the novel, recalling Morrison, opening instead with, “1 Orchard was spiteful. Full of Baby’s venom.” Verrone writes in the voice of…