The Cutting Season

Attica Locke was born in Houston, Texas in 1971, to parents who were involved in civil rights causes. Her upbringing in Texas left a deep impression that she would later draw on for her novels set in the state. After graduating from the Northwestern University School of Communications in 1995, Locke followed her older sister, Tembi, to Los Angeles. Tembi has pursued a successful acting career, appearing in films and dramas as well as shows including Bones, The Mentalist, and Beverly Hills, 90210. Attica also quickly found financial success in Hollywood as a screenwriter, but she eventually grew dissatisfied with selling scripts that didn’t end up being produced, and she turned her attention to novels. Her first novel, Black Water Rising (2009), was nominated for several prestigious awards, setting the tone for a critically and commercially successful career. To date, she has written six novels, winning the Harper Lee Award for legal fiction for Pleasantville (2015) and the coveted Edgar Award for Bluebird, Bluebird (2017). She has also continued with screenwriting, earning credits on shows like Empire, and adapting Tembi’s successful 2019 memoir for Netflix. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

The Cutting Season takes place in Louisiana in 2009, 4 years after Hurricane Katrina. While mostly hovering in the background, the storm and its aftermath are a crucial presence in the novel: the storm itself caused Caren and Eric to separate, while the environmental and economic reckoning it caused precipitates Raymond Clancy’s political opportunism. Katrina was a devastating Category 5 hurricane that flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, killed well over 1,000 people, caused $125 billion in damages, and left millions without homes, forever transforming the city. Caren’s experience of this catastrophe’s aftermath echoes her ancestor Jason’s experience of life before and just after the Civil War and the end of slavery. Jason had attempted to take advantage of the Homestead Acts of 1862 and 1866, the latter of which was specifically designed to help former enslaved people acquire land in the South following the Civil War. As in Jason’s fictional case, however, freedmen trying to make use of these acts were often stymied by discrimination and violence.

Attica Locke’s novels share many elements with one another, including southern U.S. settings, plots involving crime, mysteries, and legal procedure, and thought-provoking meditations on race and American history. Her debut novel, Black Water Rising (2009), shares The Cutting Season’s combination of gripping suspense and social consciousness, while taking place in 1980s Houston, Texas—where Locke grew up. As a whodunit, The Cutting Season is indebted to classics of the genre like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Locke’s novel’s dark themes, southern setting, and concern with the unsettled legacy of the past also owe something to the Southern Gothic genre pioneered by William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and later developed by Cormac McCarthy. Locke’s method of superimposing a contemporary murder mystery on one that took place just after the Civil War also has an analogue in Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), which follows a Black woman transported back in time to an antebellum plantation. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) likewise deals with the period immediately following the Civil War and the legacy of slavery.