Long Way Down Summary

Long Way Down has no conventional chapters. It is built from short titled poems — around 300 pages of them, most only a few lines long — and the poems are grouped by floor. The lift starts on the eighth and stops at every floor on the way down, and each stop adds one passenger, which is why readers and teachers refer to sections by floor number rather than chapter:

Before the lift

Shawn is shot outside; Will hides in his room, refuses to cry, and sets out the neighbourhood code known as The Rules.

Floor 8 — Will

Will takes the gun from the middle drawer, gets in and presses L.

Floor 7 — Buck

Shawn's mentor, shot dead two years earlier. He is the one who gave Shawn the gun Will is carrying, and he points out that a bullet is missing from it.

Floor 6 — Dani

Will's best friend from childhood, killed by a stray bullet on a playground when they were eight, with Will right beside her. Her question is the one Will cannot answer: what if you miss?

Floor 5 — Uncle Mark

Will's father's brother, killed over a drug corner he only started working to buy a film camera. He makes Will narrate the shooting step by step, like a scene, and Will stalls.

Floor 4 — Pop

Will's father, Mikey, dead since Will was three. He tells the version of his death Will has never heard — and then does something with Will's gun that Will does not see coming.

Floor 3 — Frick

The man who killed Buck, and the man Shawn killed with the missing bullet. His presence completes the loop.

Floor 2 — Shawn

Will's brother, in the clothes he died in. He greets everyone in the lift except Will.

Floor 1 — the lobby

The doors open. Everyone gets out. The book ends on a question.

So the whole story covers seven floors and roughly a minute, and the descent itself is the plot.

This Long Way Down summary begins with a shooting Will Holloman does not see clearly and cannot stop thinking about. His older brother Shawn has been killed on his way home from the store, where he had gone to buy a special soap for their mother's eczema. Police tape goes up, the crowd drifts away, and Will goes back up to the eighth floor and locks himself in the bedroom he shared with Shawn while his mother sobs in the kitchen. He wants to cry and will not let himself, because crying is against The Rules.

The Rules are three, and Will lays them out early: don't cry, no matter what; don't snitch, no matter what; and if someone you love is killed, find the person who killed them and kill them. Nobody wrote them and nobody can break them. Will's line about them is the sharpest thing in the book — they were not meant to be broken, they were meant for the broken to follow.

So Will does what the third rule requires. He opens the middle drawer of Shawn's dresser, takes the gun he knows is there, puts it in the back of his waistband, and leaves the flat to go and shoot Carlson Riggs, an old friend of Shawn's who Will is certain pulled the trigger. He has never fired a gun. He gets into the lift and presses the button for the lobby.

The lift stops on the seventh floor and Buck gets in — smoking, relaxed, and dead for two years. Buck was the man who looked after Shawn after their father died, and he is the one who gave Shawn this gun. He teases Will about whether he can really do this, and then mentions, casually, that there is a bullet missing from the clip. Will did not know that. He does not yet know what it means.

On the sixth floor, a girl Will's age gets in and he starts flirting before he recognises her. It is Dani, who was his best friend when they were eight, and who was killed by a stray bullet on a playground while Shawn threw the younger children to the ground and covered them. Dani asks the question that begins to dismantle him: what if you miss? Because a bullet that misses is exactly what killed her.

On the fifth floor comes Uncle Mark, who puts Will in a headlock and then asks him to tell the story of what he is about to do, scene by scene, the way a filmmaker would — Mark had started selling drugs only to buy a camera, and then never stopped, and was shot over a corner. Will can narrate everything up to pulling the trigger, and then stops. When he finally says the word, Mark asks what happens next. Will says: nothing, that's the end. Mark tells him it is never the end.

The fourth floor is the worst of it. Will's father Mikey steps in — dead since Will was three, remembered only through other people's stories, officially of a broken heart. Pop tells him the real version. When Uncle Mark was killed, Pop followed The Rules exactly as Will is about to: he waited at Mark's corner, saw the man he was sure had done it, pulled up his hood and shot him, then shot him again out of rage. He could not sleep, could not touch his wife or his sons. And then he admits the part Will has never heard — he killed the wrong man. The man he shot, Gee, was connected to Mark's killer but had not done it. Not long afterwards someone walked up to Pop at a payphone, asked whether he knew a man named Gee, and shot him. Then Pop hugs his son, takes the gun out of Will's waistband and holds it to Will's head until Will wets himself, before handing it back without explaining why.

On the third floor a stranger gets in, and Buck introduces him: Frick, the man who killed Buck during a robbery that went wrong. Frick is dead too, and Will works out how — Shawn killed him. That is the missing bullet. Which means Shawn, the brother who taught him The Rules and who Will has been thinking of as purely a victim, had already been through this same lift ride himself, and may have been shot for it.

On the second floor Shawn gets in, wearing what he died in. He nods to everyone. He does not say a single word to Will. The lift is thick with smoke by now, all of the dead smoking at once, and Will feels like he is standing in a vertical coffin. He tells Shawn he is scared. And then his brother — the one who invented the rule about not crying, as far as Will is concerned — begins to cry, and Will lets one tear go and decides that one does not count.

Long Way Down ends on a cliffhanger, deliberately, and refuses to tell you what Will decides.

The lift reaches the lobby. The doors open. Every one of the dead — Buck, Dani, Uncle Mark, Pop, Frick and Shawn — walks out ahead of Will, and Will stays where he is, still holding the gun, having just watched his brother break the first of the three Rules by crying. Then Shawn turns around and speaks his only words of the entire ride, which are also the last words of the book: "You coming?"

The question has two readings and Jason Reynolds has been clear that he wants both of them live at once. It can mean: are you coming to do the thing, to follow us, to take your place in this line of dead men — in which case Will is being invited to his own funeral. It can equally mean: are you coming out of the lift, out of the loop, are you leaving this behind. Reynolds has said in interviews that he wrote it this way because the reader has to make the choice themselves; giving Will an ending would let the reader off.

What the book does resolve is Will's certainty, and that is the real arc. He gets into the lift knowing exactly who killed Shawn and exactly what he owes him. Seven floors later he knows that his father killed an innocent man believing the same thing, that his brother had already killed someone for the same reason, that a missed shot killed his best friend, and that every passenger in the lift is a consequence of somebody else obeying rule three. He also knows something he cannot unlearn: that if he goes through with it, someone will eventually get into a lift for him.

So the last page is not ambiguous about whether The Rules work. It is only ambiguous about whether a fifteen-year-old with a gun in his waistband and sixty seconds of new information can act on that.

Jason Reynolds writes in short lines, so the quotes from Long Way Down keep their shape. These are verbatim:

DON'T NOBODY / believe nothing / these days / which is why I haven't / told nobody the story / I'm about to tell you.

THE RULES / NO. 1: CRYING / Don't. No matter what. Don't. / NO. 2: SNITCHING / Don't. No matter what. Don't. / NO. 3: REVENGE / If someone you love gets killed, find the person who killed them and kill them.

ANOTHER THING ABOUT THE RULES / They weren't meant to be broken. / They were meant for the broken / to follow.

I felt like crying / which felt like / another person / trapped behind my face / tiny fists punching / the backs of my eyes / feet kicking / my throat at the spot / where the swallow starts.

"You coming?"

The first is the opening of the book and the last is the whole of the final page.