Having experienced rejection with his earlier publication attempts, Vian marketed I Spit on Your Graves as a "translation" of an original work by a certain Vernon Sullivan, allegedly an African-American writer of hardboiled fiction —a genre very popular at the time.

[1] Due to the novel's shocking subject matter (with many disturbing scenes of rape and murder), Vian claimed that its author was forced out of his native country, and he was now living as an expatriate in France, to escape censorship and racial violence.

This elaborate literary hoax that Vian had concocted was only exposed long after I Spit on Your Graves had gained notoriety and financial success, becoming the most talked about book of 1947.

Working in a second-hand bookstore, he immediately starts hanging out with the local teen crowd and he indulges in sex with underage girls "whose breasts are firm to the touch, like ripe plums", secretly aiming to defile and humiliate them.

[2] Chris Petit reviewed the book for The Guardian in 2001, and called it "dreamily convincing", elaborating: "A main inspiration would have been the slew of Hollywood movies that opened in Paris after the liberation, identified by the French as films noirs.

Instead of hindering Vian, this made him crank out three more "Vernon Sullivan" novels during that same year, including the similarly-themed The Dead All Have the Same Skin, whose protagonist, Daniel Parker, is named after the head of the Cartel d'action sociale et morale.