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2015 Book Review #7: The Shining Girls
Title: The Shining Girls
Author: Lauren Beukes
Genre: Time-traveling thriller
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A time-traveling serial killer drawn to sparky, fiercely independent young women seems unstoppable until one of his victims survives and starts hunting him.
Thoughts: Serial killers, in fiction at least, almost always seem to go after young women. For the most part, the victims get a paragraph or two of description and then some artfully displayed carnage. Beukes plays with the conventions of the genre, barely describing the bodies and focusing on the lives of the victims and the devastation left behind.
Each victim is a fascinating character in her own right—the young African American widow who takes up riveting in World War II to support her four children, the Korean American economist-turned-social worker, the transwoman trying to make a living as a sideshow dancer, the architect afraid of being accused by McCarthyites of being pink, the abortion rights activist on the eve of Roe vs. Wade. The killer—awkward, charming, completely unable to make a human connection—is drawn into a time knot that brings into question predestination and free will as he acts out the murders he has already seen recorded.
Kirby, the lone survivor, is the driving force of the book. She refuses to accept the mantle of victimhood, refuses to conform to the destiny she was given. Her brokenness and her refusal to be destroyed by it, her dark humor and compulsion towards justice, propels her forward instead of in circles, dragging a hapless reporter along in her wake.
Too often, serial killer thrillers make the reader sickly complicit in the murders, satiating our desire for sensationalism and the macabre with the bodies of all-too-disposable sweet young things. This one refuses to glorify the killer or make him into a brilliant mastermind. Not only does it refuse to make the point of the victims their deaths, it makes us mourn who they could have been. And it celebrates the contributions they have already made. Each victim is a hero in her own right. And one of their own is finally able to avenge them.
Author: Lauren Beukes
Genre: Time-traveling thriller
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A time-traveling serial killer drawn to sparky, fiercely independent young women seems unstoppable until one of his victims survives and starts hunting him.
Thoughts: Serial killers, in fiction at least, almost always seem to go after young women. For the most part, the victims get a paragraph or two of description and then some artfully displayed carnage. Beukes plays with the conventions of the genre, barely describing the bodies and focusing on the lives of the victims and the devastation left behind.
Each victim is a fascinating character in her own right—the young African American widow who takes up riveting in World War II to support her four children, the Korean American economist-turned-social worker, the transwoman trying to make a living as a sideshow dancer, the architect afraid of being accused by McCarthyites of being pink, the abortion rights activist on the eve of Roe vs. Wade. The killer—awkward, charming, completely unable to make a human connection—is drawn into a time knot that brings into question predestination and free will as he acts out the murders he has already seen recorded.
Kirby, the lone survivor, is the driving force of the book. She refuses to accept the mantle of victimhood, refuses to conform to the destiny she was given. Her brokenness and her refusal to be destroyed by it, her dark humor and compulsion towards justice, propels her forward instead of in circles, dragging a hapless reporter along in her wake.
Too often, serial killer thrillers make the reader sickly complicit in the murders, satiating our desire for sensationalism and the macabre with the bodies of all-too-disposable sweet young things. This one refuses to glorify the killer or make him into a brilliant mastermind. Not only does it refuse to make the point of the victims their deaths, it makes us mourn who they could have been. And it celebrates the contributions they have already made. Each victim is a hero in her own right. And one of their own is finally able to avenge them.