Goodreads: Ailey | Bisexual Bookshelf
December 2nd, 2025
bookshelves: abolition, anticapitalism, anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, anti-queerphobia, antiracism, anti-white-supremacy, anti-surveillance, anti-transphobia, arc, class-consciousness, community-care, memoir, nonfiction, pro-palestine-author, ptsd-representation, sober-living-representation, substance-abuse-representation, therapy-representation, top-read-of-2025, trauma-and-healing, all-time-fave
Thank you to Stephanie at PM Press for the gifted ARC! This book will be published in the US on January 20th, 2026.
“Prisoners are human. We are deserving of love and support and kindness. And hopefully there will be people there to provide those things when we set foot outside the walls.”
Eric King’s A Clean Hell walks readers through the bowels of a system most Americans are taught not to look at directly. King writes from inside the belly of the state, and his voice is steady even when the world around him is built to break him. His prose is sharp and unsentimental, but his clarity is rooted in care. He never lets the reader forget that the men held in ADX are human beings with histories, communities, and interior lives, even when the prison works tirelessly to erase every trace of that humanity.
The book begins with King’s own path to incarceration after the police murder of Michael Brown. An act of solidarity leads to his arrest, and what follows is a brutal education in how the Bureau of Prisons weaponizes fear, isolation, and bureaucracy to keep people quiet. King’s refusal to fold during abuse from guards results in a federal trial, which he wins, yet the retaliation afterward is swift. His transfer to ADX with only two years left in his sentence reveals the arbitrary cruelty of the system and how political prisoners are shuffled around in order to disappear them.
What struck me most was how intimately King traces the mechanics of dehumanization. ADX is designed to strip prisoners of connection, bodily autonomy, medical care, and meaningful contact with the outside world. The state calls this “security.” King names it for what it is: torture. Yet woven through the horror are moments of profound tenderness, like the rush of receiving a letter or the stolen wonder of seeing the night sky when the power goes out. The routines he creates for himself become acts of self-definition. His joy becomes resistance.
King situates ADX within the long arc of United States colonialism and state violence, revealing the lie of “the worst of the worst.” He points out what abolitionists already know: the most dangerous people in this country are not locked inside cells but seated in boardrooms and political offices. The men in ADX are not monsters. They are people the state found easier to bury than to reckon with.
While it feels strange to say this about a book filled with suffering, I loved A Clean Hell. King’s commitment to his ethics, even when everything around him was designed to crush them, moved me deeply. His insistence on solidarity over spectacle echoes long after the final page. Prisons cannot deliver healing or safety. They can only replicate violence. If we want a world beyond harm, we must free the people living inside these cages and choose community and accountability instead of punishment. As King reminds us, all cops are bastards. Toward liberation!
📖 Read this if you love: abolitionist writing grounded in lived experience, first-person testimony that exposes the brutality of U.S. prisons, narratives that refuse to let the state define who is “worthy,” or the works of Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
🔑 Key Themes: State Violence and Dehumanization, Prisoner Resistance and Survival, Dignity under Oppression, Political Prisoners and Solidarity, State-Manufactured Propaganda, Joy as a Form of Resistance.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Sexual Assault (severe), Torture (severe), Violence (severe), Police Brutality (severe), Murder (minor), Gun Violence (minor), Racism (minor), Pandemic (minor), Medical Content (severe), Medical Trauma (severe), Fire/Fire Injury (minor), Self Harm (minor), Suicide (minor), Homophobia (moderate), Physical Abuse (severe).
