Invincible by David Styles, better known by his rap name of Styles P., is his freshman novel debut. Although he is a lot more chill nowadays, I’ve followed his rap career for some time and back then, he claimed to be the hardest rapper out and in the rap game, that’s not a title anyone can just claim without either repercussions (hopefully via music only) or without support from your peers. Known for his hardcore street lyrics and rhymes, I was very curious to see how his years as a rapper would transform into the longer form of a novel instead of just a two to three minute song. To be honest, I was quite impressed. However, it was easy for me to spot some of the awkwardness in this debut novel.
“When it comes to being locked up, sometimes I wake up happy that I’m locked up because if I was free someone would probably be getting killed right now.”
Clips
I can’t lie. I read almost 40% of the book in the first sitting. The story of Jake Billings along with the constant paranoia he has to deal with at every corner and every minute is insane. The pacing of the story is fast, so something is always happening. Jake is always planning and making moves to ensure that he stays alive long enough to discover who wants him dead. The fact that he cannot trust anymore makes his paranoia that much more claustrophobic. Be prepared to expect a lot of violence in this novel. In addition, the n**** word will also be used a lot.
Some things are hard to kill and sometimes it’s just not your time. There are men who have been in war for years and come home untouched. Then you have those who die the first time they step on the battlefield. A strong will and strong spirit is hard to break!
Frank
So I don’t have many issues with the novel except for one major point. A lot of the dialogue, especially with the villains and with Phil specifically, sounded very corny. I just couldn’t picture someone with his profile talking like that. I believe it may also be attributed to the overuse of the exclamation marks in the dialogue. For this reason alone, it made some of the characters themselves a bit unbelievable. As I mentioned earlier, this can likely be attributed to his first novel being published. If he decides to write future novels, I’m thinking his writing would be more polished. Being that this novel came out in 2010, and I don’t see any other having been published since then, this is unlikely to happen now.
Being that Styles P. is also one of my favorite rappers, I had to leave a couple of his more memorable lines:
“Bust my gun at the sun just to sit in the shade”
“Don’t you ever get talk of killin me, word to Allah, I squeeze the burner in your face till it turn to tar, what!”
The Mindless Catalog 
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