The Occidental Hotel

"Mays's passion for art electrifies fascinating sketches of Beuys." -- Quill and Quire, 2020
Ostensibly a family memoir, John Bentley Mays's Power in the Blood is a lyrical remembrance of his ancestors in the American South. He traces his lineage back to the arrival of a forebear in 1609 and then provides an illuminating view of how historical events were experienced by a large extended family. Mays's chronicle of his ancestors' lives during the colonial period, through the great upheavals of the Civil War, and into the 20th century is a beautifully written and highly informative narrative. -- Amazon.com
A Canadian unearths his Southern roots in what the publisher hopes is another Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. -- Library Journal
What Mays does well in the novel is to write impeccable prose and create suspense. There is a lot of "where is he going with this" throughout the book or perhaps better put "is he really going in that direction." To a certain extent, he does stir up some empathy for his confused anti-hero narrator. Capturing the Zeitgeist of the experimental artists of the 1970s and 80s is another notable feature of Mays' writing. The author was, after all, Canada's leading art critic. -- Ottawa Review of Books
The Occidental Hotel is a shockingly good book . . . And although it touches on many ideas and things, and is deeply pleasurable to read because of the masterful quality of Mays's gifted language, it is finally and fundamentally a critique and satire of Western white supremacy and the attending wickedness and lunacy of that historical and current force. -- Border Crossings Magazine