An absorbing, twisted tale of psychosis, murder, and grief.
An unhinged woman goes on a killing spree in the wake of her boyfriend’s suicide in this novella.
Elsby’s third book introduces a dark female narrator who’s as coldblooded as she is introspective about her day-to-day motivations. Readers first find the unnamed protagonist at the memorial for her cheating boyfriend, who chose suicide (she found his bloodied corpse). She has invited Jeff, a friend of her boyfriend’s, to the melancholy event, then regrets it after feeling “obligated to entertain him.” Admiring his tall, albeit thin stature (“You could run into him and just keep going”), she decides to “sadfuck” Jeff by enticing him to her home, where she fantasizes about murdering him. She wonders which room would offer the least amount of cleanup. While visiting another male friend, she suddenly slams her face into his glass coffee table because “it felt good,” then slashes him to death. An interlude with her next mark, named Charles, closes the book with a deadly cliffhanger. Elsby’s prose style is both experimentally stream of consciousness and cerebral. Often, the narrator nearly snuffs herself out amid passages of essayistic exposition about everything from the flaccid genitalia of men to the water glass her deceased boyfriend inadvertently left under her bed, which sends her into a manic psychosis. Interestingly, Elsby’s debut, Hexis(2020), also featured a conniving, psychopathic female protagonist. In this latest work, some of the narrator’s meditations are as profound as they are macabre: As an aging body begins to “degrade over time...their faces start to fall off the bones, but the whole skin of them is pinned at the top, so it has to stretch rather than fall down.” The author manages to achieve a delicate balance between melodrama, meditative inner discourse, and the psychological horror of tempestuous relationships as her misanthropic hero has anonymous sex in public restrooms and enjoys a succession of slashfests with oblivious men. Still, the unconventional novella is a challenging read. Psychological suspense fans will stick with Elsby’s manipulative murderer as she cunningly weaves her thick, textured yarn about the nuances of relationships, death, and sex; others may grow weary of the witty, rambling diatribes of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
An absorbing, twisted tale of psychosis, murder, and grief.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-955904-11-7
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Clash Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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