SHOOT ME IN THE FACE ON A BEAUTIFUL DAY

An abused woman is pushed to the point of fracture in Murray’s literary horror novel.

Bernadette “Birdie” Black lives in fear of setting off her boyfriend Russ Swinbank’s explosive temper. He flies into a rage if she doesn’t make a dinner he likes, for instance, and she’s afraid to tell him about her plans to go to nursing school. “He loves me,” she insists to her best friend, who regularly encourages Birdie to leave him. “He does! He just has a hard time showing it.” On some level, Birdie feels that she deserves Russ’ cruelty: She blames herself for the accidental death of her son, Noah, and for an affair that she had that destroyed her first marriage. As Birdie works around Russ’ moods—and his frequent nights away from the house—she frets over her future, experiments with a grief group, and even reconnects with her ex-husband, Noah’s father. As her story unfolds, the novel intersperses chapters from the viewpoints of other women—all victims of a local serial killer, including one who’s already dead and moldering in the woods. Can Birdie overcome her self-hatred enough to save herself from Russ, or is she, like the victims of the killer stalking her community, caught in a trap that will inevitably destroy her? Murray writes with a horror novelist’s sense of tension and dread. Her skills are particularly on display in the chapters about the killer’s victims, as in this passage about a woman named Maeve: “she’d left a window cracked and a man she’d seen four days before at a gas station, a stranger who’d eyed her up and down and given her the creeps, had checked every door and window each day since he followed her home.” The book also persuasively dramatizes the mindset of an abused person, and although it takes her situation to its darkest extremes, it never abandons a sense of emotional verisimilitude.

A finely wrought and deeply disturbing work of psychological terror.