God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer unfolds over a single chaotic shift in a Philadelphia trauma center, narrated by Joey, an Iraq War veteran now working in the ER while pursuing a graduate degree. The novel opens with a litany of patients waiting for care — a young boy with a gunshot wound, a savagely beaten homeless man — while Joey, slowly being driven mad by hunger, waits for his friend Ray to bring him a hoagie and the Otis Spunkmeyer muffin of the title.

Joseph Earl Thomas uses the shift as scaffolding for a much wider, stream-of-consciousness portrait of Joey's life: children with three different mothers, a mother of his own who has cycled through prison and addiction, a largely uneventful stint in the Army, and a childhood defined by poverty in a roach-infested apartment. The novel moves fluidly between the present tense of the ward and these flashbacks, refusing a tidy separation between Joey's professional competence and his personal chaos.

The result is a dense, unsparing examination of everyday Black life — health, sex, race, punishment, and the distance between what people want and what the systems around them allow.