Eskor David Johnson Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Eskor David Johnson is a published author who hails from Trinidad and Tobago as well as the United States.

In addition to writing a novel, Johnson has had other writing featured in places such as BOMB Magazine and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. He attended Harvard University and graduated from there as well as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There he received the Richard Yates Short Story Prize as well as the Teaching-Writing Fellowship and the Maytag Fellowship.

Today he resides in New York City.

His debut novel is titled Pay As You Go. It came out for the first time in 2023. If you’ve been looking for something relatively recent to read and want a story that is going to whisk you away from the everyday hustle and bustle and give you a fictional world you can inhabit for a while, check this novel out and see what you think.

Main character Slide is new to town and had a sense of confidence before he did so that bordered on the delusional. It’s one thing to think that things are going to work out, but there is nothing in Slide’s life that would have suggested this was going to be the case. Still, he picks up and makes his way to his new home, hoping that everything will work out for him.

He always thought before he moved that he would live somewhere really nice. Slide could have pictured himself residing in a fancy, completely glossy building that came with doormen and offered up incredible views of the skyline. He would live there, lounging around in a bathrobe, making himself lattes and cappuccinos in his home, and feeling like he was residing in the lap of utter luxury.

While this would have been nice, it turns out not to be the case. He finds that he has instead landed in an apartment that is stuffy and creaking that is not a beautiful place where he lives on his own with privacy and intention but instead has to share his space with roommates in order to survive. They are not the ideal housemates to live with, either.

One of Slide’s roommates is a large man who tends to stick to his room and hardly ever comes out. The other one is neurotic and is obsessed with their weight. They also tend to be a bit eccentric, which is likely the proper term for someone who has exactly 47 lamps that they keep around the house that are all going all of the time no matter what the hour is.

Slide is a barber with a mysterious past and does not want to accept that this is where he has landed in life. He is on a mission to find the ideal apartment out there and is making his way through the sprawling city of Polis to do so. He makes his way through its various neighborhoods but is now in a lower tier than he was previously.

He is crashing on foldout couches and making do with disaster relief tents. He meets some unsavory characters along the way, people who are very hardened and very tough. Slide has always believed that the best was waiting for him, but that is not the case. This is a reality that is hitting him really hard as it’s tough not to notice that he’s not in some upscale residence but exactly where his choices and circumstances have landed him.

The more time that he spends in the outside world, the more that Slide starts to have a realization. If he wants to have anything good for himself, he’s going to have to really fight for it. No one out there is going to walk up to him and give it to him and he’s going to have to really scratch to get somewhere if he wants to end up someplace good. Especially if he wants to live in a place that has laundry in-unit.

Slide has made some particular choices in his life, and now he has ended up on the streets. The result is his going on an odyssey in the exterior world. Will Slide be able to find what he is looking for or will he end up lost? He’s starting to realize that he is going to have to really fight if he wants to get a better situation for himself and find his place in the world, especially if he wants to live in a place that has in-unit laundry.

Sometimes the only thing that any of us want is a place that feels like home where we can rest our head. This novel also poses the question of whether the thing that we are looking for is out there. This is a thoughtful novel penned by one of the most talented and promising new voices in fiction today.

Check out this debut from Eskor David Johnson to follow along with every word in a surreal and triumphant story that will have readers eagerly turning the pages until they get to the end.