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Long Way Down follows fifteen-year-old Will Holloman as he mourns the recent death of his beloved older brother, who was killed in a gang-related shooting. As the story begins, Will is in shock, struggling with how to move forward in the wake of his profound loss. Throughout the novel, Will grapples with following The Rules, the set of cultural expectations that guide men in his community, and pushes himself to abide them and seek revenge for his brother’s death. This imperative wars with the realities of Will’s innocence, inexperience with violence, and the disorientation of his fresh grief. Will embarks on an otherworldly, Dickensian elevator ride where on each floor he is visited by six dead people whose lives were stolen due to an unending, generational cycle of violence and retribution. As each of the dead attempts to dissuade Will from his plan, Will is confronted by the underbelly of his community’s prevailing ethos and must face the grim realities of grief and loss in order to reach for the possibility of a new beginning.
The inciting incident occurs when Will’s teenage older brother Shawn is shot while Will speaks to a friend nearby on the basketball court. The scene is told in flashback, as Will struggles to understand the loss of his brother and how to move forward from the tragedy. Will’s mind is thick with grief, and his loss is so fresh that he still has trouble articulating what happened to his brother or wrapping his mind around his death. Isolated in his and Shawn’s room, Will aches for his aggrieved mother, who he can hear loudly weeping and drinking in the other room, expressing the emotions that Will struggles to avoid expressing. From this fog of grief and pain, Will recites The Rules of his community to himself, rules that he clings to in order to guide his actions and to ideally assuage his suffering. Codifying the toxic masculinity that has led to the death of not only Will’s brother but his uncle and father, too, The Rules require him not to cry, not to snitch, and to seek revenge. Retrieving his brother’s gun from the askew middle drawer of his dresser where Shawn stowed it away, Will sets out to kill the boy he thinks murdered his brother, a former friend of Shawn’s by the name of Carlton Riggs.
The novel is told in verse, with over 250 short, powerful poems following Will through his journey down into the underworld of grief, violence, and pain. These poems move back and forth between Will’s present, mourning his brother and riding down the elevator with the dead, and the past, in which he recounts the stories of the dead and how their lives came to end too soon. This structure mirrors Will’s journey, as he travels to the past with the dead in between each floor. Each poem occupies a slim column on the page, and the reader’s eyes travel down the page much in the same way Will travels down the elevator. Equally, the brevity in language via poetics mirrors the brief suspension of time that occurs between floors. As a result, each page mimics the sense of descent, and Will travels down as though he is going through a kind of hell or to L, as Will and Shawn used to think of it, the loser destination.
The rising action occurs when Will meets his first ghost, Buck, who gets on the elevator on the seventh floor. As soon as Will encounters Buck, the reality of Will’s life begins to change. He is shocked to talk to the dead and fears that it signifies his own impending death. This suggests that Will’s journey in the elevator is a confrontation with his deepest fears and with his relationship to death itself. Through Buck, and the other dead people yet to come, Will starts to understand that there is a thin veil between life and death, as reflected in one of his anagrams, ALIVE = A VEIL. Each of the dead teach Will something that was inaccessible to him in life and in his fractured state in the wake of his brother’s death. Buck, for example, goads Will into considering whether he has what it takes to kill someone, literally wrestling the gun out of Will’s waistband and making him fight for it. Dani makes Will reconsider whether he even knows who his brother’s true killer is. The ghosts also fill the elevator with a fog of cigarette smoke, which makes it hard for Will to breathe. In the same way, Will’s grief obscures his perception of reality and brings him that much closer to death.
Then, Will sees his father for the first time, learns his father killed the wrong man, and crumbles when his father pulls a gun on him. This encounter shakes Will to his core. Seeing his father is an opportunity for Will to know the man who never got a chance to raise him, and at first, when he sees his father, he’s flooded with love. Their first embrace is a comfort to Will, and he feels as though the wounds of grief are soothed through his father’s love. However, when he learns that his father killed the wrong man, he is disappointed, not because he lost his father for a senseless reason, but because his father failed to successfully get revenge on his brother’s murderer. This disappointment is uncomfortable for him and furthers his process of questioning his own revenge plan. In the second embrace, Will’s father pulls a gun on him and puts it to Will’s temple. Instead of talking to his son with the same love he experienced in their first embrace or relying on an emotional appeal to change Will’s mind, Pops results to violence, a display of brute force, and humiliation. Will wets himself in front of the other dead people and lashes out at his father in rage when he lowers the gun. Though Pops is attempting to save his son, he does so using the only language accessible to him, the language of violence.
The climax of the novel occurs when Will finally sees his brother Shawn, and Shawn begins to weep and keen in mourning. Instead of speaking directly to Will or trying to convince him through violence or words to choose a different path, Shawn simply begins to cry, violating the first Rule. By violating The Rules, Shawn shows Will with his actions that The Rules need to be broken, that the only way forward is to set aside the set of expectations that leads to unending death and heartache and find a different path, rooted in true emotion and letting go. When Shawn begins to moan like the machinery of the elevator, from his mouth and his belly, he expresses what has before been inexpressible: the overwhelming pain of loss, the brokenness of the system of vigilante justice, and the regret he has for the dead and living alike. In the wake of Shawn’s emotional display, nothing can be the same for the brothers.
In the falling action, the dead leave the elevator. The smoke dissipates, mirroring how Will can now see more clearly even through his grief. He is left alone on the elevator as the dead move forward into the world, further emphasizing the thin veil between life and death. Finally, Shawn speaks to Will for the first time, and asks “You coming?” This is an invitation for Will to join in the wisdom of the dead, to use what he has learned in the elevator to forge a different path for himself. Shawn’s emotional display has the potential to set Will free, and Will, able to see that he was headed down a treacherous path, has the opportunity to take his brother’s invitation to lead a different kind of life than the other men in his family.
