The popular US novelist Paul Auster is turning his sights on America's epidemic of gun violence in a hard-hitting, 100-page essay that features photos from mass shootings.

Bloodbath Nation (Grove Press) is due to be published on Tuesday in the United States.

The writing in this new work by Auster, 75, is terse and sombre and is accompanied by pictures taken by photographer Spencer Ostrander.

Auster says one of the reasons he is writing it is a family secret that was kept from him until he was a young man.

“The truth comes down to this: on January 23, 1919,” he writes in the book, “my grandmother shot and killed my grandfather.”

Auster says his father was only six years old then and his uncle, who witnessed the killing, nine.

The grandmother went on trial in Wisconsin but was found innocent for reasons of temporary insanity. She and her five children ended up settling in New Jersey, “where my father grew up in a wrecked family.”

“The Gun had caused all this, and not only did the children have no father, they lived with the knowledge that their mother had killed him,” Auster wrote.

Like gun control advocates and victims associations before him, Auster recites the horrifying numbers associated with gun violence in America: more than 40,000 people die by gunfire each year, half of them suicides. And guns outnumber people, by 393 million to 338 million.

The book features dozens of black and white photos by Ostrander of the scenes of mass shootings, such as the LGBTQ nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida in 2016. More than 50 people died in that massacre.

They also show a supermarket, a temple, a parking lot, or other places but never a human being.

“I chose to focus on the site of the shooting as a symbol. Whether it’s rebuilt, whether it’s razed, whether it’s left to decay, that’s a symbol of how Americans value this issue,” Ostrander said in October in an interview with Publishers Weekly.

“The fissures in American society are steadily growing into great chasms of empty space,” Auster writes in his book.

Auster made his name with pacy, noirish novels about lonely writers, outsiders and down-and-outers.

Now he’s tackling America’s epidemic of gun violence in an impassioned account of the slaughter of innocents in schools, malls, clubs and churches.

The 75-year-old author with the soulful, sunken eyes gained cult status in the 1980s and 1990s with his New York Trilogy of metaphysical mysteries and his hip film Smoke, about the lost souls who patronise a Brooklyn tobacco shop.

His more than 30 books are as likely to be found in airports as on university reading lists and have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Lost father

Neither of Auster’s Jewish Polish immigrant parents went to university and there were few books in his home growing up in Newark, New Jersey.

But he discovered the power of the pen – and found his vocation – after composing a poem about the arrival of spring. 

It was a “horrible” poem, he admitted later, but the act of writing changed his way of seeing the world.

He moved to New York to attend Columbia University and after graduating spent four years in France, where he lived from translations while struggling to hone his craft.

He went through particularly dark times in the 1970s when he married, then four years later divorced, US short story writer Lydia Davis, with whom he had Daniel.

“I had run into a wall with my work. I was blocked and miserable, my marriage was falling apart, I had no money. I was finished,” he told The New York Times in 1992.

The turning point came with the sudden death of his father, which spurred Auster to write The Invention of Solitude, a haunting memoir of his dad and reflection on father-son relationships, a recurring theme in Auster’s work.

Published in 1982, it was a critical success and set Auster free with his writing. 

The same year he married fellow author Siri Hustvedt.

New York modernist

His big breakthrough came with The New York Trilogy, a philosophical twist on the detective genre featuring a shady quartet of private investigators named Blue, Brown, Black and White.

That period also brought a downbeat dog tasked with getting his dead owner’s unpublished manuscript out of a bus station’s luggage locker in Timbuktu (1999) and a series of existential capers: Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990) and Leviathan (1992).

His gift for sharp dialogue – Auster mercilessly edits himself for sentence rhythm – was key to the success of Smoke, which he wrote and co-directed, about a Brooklyn smoke shop owner played by Harvey Keitel.

He also co-directed the follow-up, Blue in the Face that featured Keitel again, alongside Jim Jarmusch, Michael J. Fox, Madonna and Lou Reed.

‘American pride’

In 2017, he broke with his concise style to deliver a 866-page tome, 4 3 2 1, charting American society through the life of an everyman, Archie Ferguson.

Auster presented it as his masterwork.

But while America’s National Public Radio found it “dazzling”, others were less positive, with Britain’s The Guardian calling it a “poorly-edited disaster” and The Irish Times deeming it “the last fat novel of a collapsed American pride”.

Public and private tragedies

Bloodbath Nation takes him into new terrain.

Deeply moved by US photographer Spencer Ostrander’s haunting black-and-white pictures from the sites of more than 30 mass shootings, Auster penned an accompanying text about the massacre of innocents in schools, clubs, churches and malls across America.

Guns are “the central metaphor for everything that continues to divide us”, says Auster, calling for Americans to engage in a “gut-wrenching examination of who we are and who we want to be”.

While tackling a very public tragedy, Auster has also faced private anguish.

In 2021, his son Daniel was found guilty of negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month-old daughter Ruby. In 2022, Daniel himself died of an overdose at the age of 44.

Auster has never publicly discussed their deaths. He and Hustvedt have a daughter, singer Sophie Auster.