PSYCHROS

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.