MURDER BIMBO

Three ways of looking at a bizarre and prescient story of political assassination.

“I’m a thirty-two-year-old sex worker who just killed a politician on what I thought were the orders of the American government. Here’s your chance to catch me before I become a scapegoat, a punching bag, or a monster who needs reputation restitution. Please, please, please turn me into a feminist antihero.” Murder Bimbo, as she describes herself in the email quoted above, addressing a podcast host named Justice Bimbo, may not sound ripped from the headlines, but her victim, Meat Neck, is eerily familiar. Young, handsome, claiming his is “a new kind of conservatism,” he is anathema to the queer community, particularly the narrator’s desperately missed ex-girlfriend, aka X. “Is there a bigger act of love than murder?” wonders the accidental assassin after perpetrating Meat Neck’s demise—at which point he becomes the subject of a special four-part series called Killing Baby Hitler: Meat Neck and the Making of an American Folk Hero. It’s amazing to think that all this was written long before Charlie Kirk was killed. That is intriguing in and of itself, but whirling around those provocative plot elements is a fractured narrative that will tax many readers’ comprehension and patience. Structured in three acts which continually reshape the identities of the characters and the details of the events surrounding the murder, the drama screeches to a halt with an epilogue that navigates back toward a more conventional storyline. Or maybe not. By the end of the book, one’s brains are so thoroughly scrambled that one can only stare at the author’s bio—Novack is a mother of two with a masters in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, living with her husband and children in the Hudson Valley! Surely this is the final plot twist.

Requires sophistication and patience beyond the reach of the ordinary reader.