Tyrant, Draw Thy Sword

by Soren Narnia

The year was 2007, and conditions in Bello Gardens, one of the most squalid and dangerous housing projects in America, were at their worst. Decimated by poverty, tortured by crime, and suffocated by neglect, the slum known cynically as the Joke faced a lonely, unnoticed death. When its residents were displaced through a deal to sell the land to an overwhelmingly white Christian university, tensions in the community rose to a breaking point. Finally, a televised debate about the crisis led to a Congressman's unforgivable public slur, and a civil rights radical's shocking act of martyrdom. It was then that the last remaining inhabitants of Bello Gardens—desperate gang members turned remorseless freedom fighters—vowed not to give up its deserted streets without a battle to the death. Tyrant, Draw Thy Sword is the oral history of the tactical siege of the Joke, told from a distance of two decades by both those who were there and those who have inadvertently distorted events they never knew first-hand. Over the course of the story, dozens of characters struggle to understand the December night when this country's troubled divide between cultures erupted in chaotic house-to-house warfare.

185 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 2005

About the author

Soren Narnia's books are offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, meaning that anyone is free to adapt them as they see fit, even for profit, without the obligation to compensate the author.

Reviews

[Vanessa Wolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review from the production “Those Snowy Nights You Read to Me will Never be Forgotten,” a podcast

I very much recommend this version of the book, it’s done with a diverse cast, and while the story is bittersweet be advised it’s a more realistic than romantic look at what living in a certain kind of neighborhood looks like.
It’s constructed much like WWZ (following interviews and journals left by witnesses) and the audio really adds volumes to the characters without bogging down the story. Excellent cast of narrators, as someone who lived in East St Louis and Indiana the accent is one where it’s easy to slip into either east coast or parody, but the narrators never falter. The light music accompaniment is fitting and lingers long after the story ends.

[Therese · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very dark look at a fictional gang uprising in a horrible big-city housing project. The author does an impressive job of humanizing the characters and making them seem realistic, paradoxically by keeeping them at arm's length as the story is told in the style of a documentary film. There are moments of beauty and soulful wisdom here that make this well worth a read despite the depressing subject matter - on the whole, a challenging book by a solid writer.