BULLETPROOF

A young, traumatized woman, transformed by the military into a near-invincible weapon, goes on a vengeful killing spree in Dubrow’s thriller.

While she’s only a teenager, Nell Slagle’s life falls apart when her emotionally disturbed brother, Carson, shoots and kills 25 people, mostly children, at Red Clay Middle School in Cleveland, Tennessee. He also murders their mother, Peggy, and badly wounds Nell, who for a time is paralyzed from the waist down. Undone by the unspeakable tragedy, Nell spirals into drug addiction and homelessness until she’s recruited into a secret military program run by the Honeydew Industries Research Facility, which aims to produce a new kind of soldier—one who’s genetically armored with bulletproof skin. Nell becomes “Number Forty-Eight,” the most successful of the experimental subjects, a group largely made up of unhoused drug addicts. Her skin is rendered invulnerable to bullets, her bones become shatterproof, and her internal organs grow immune to harm. She’s thoroughly disgusted, however—not only by the secret military program that took advantage of her life’s utter disarray but also by the violent culture of gun ownership that dominates America. (This formulaic moralistic streak runs through Dubrow’s otherwise inventive novel.) “If the NRA put a penny of their blood-soaked profits into medical care for the mentally ill, I might take their concern seriously. Instead, they used the Red Clay shooting as another way to scare gun nuts into buying more guns.” Nell embarks on a spectacular campaign of revenge. This is a deliberately fantastical plot, relentlessly implausible from the start, and, for all its extraordinary violence, much more farcical than serious. The unbelievability, though, is not a vice, but rather an expression of the author’s madcap imagination, which makes for a wildly entertaining story. Nell is a fascinatingly complex, even contradictory, antihero, a woman deeply empathetic to those who have suffered from gun violence but also willing to murder scores of others with the very same weapons. The canned sermonizing about the evils of gun ownership grows tedious, but it doesn’t ultimately derail this rollicking adventure—which is genuinely funny.

A satirical novel that is refreshingly unpredictable.