The Shining Girls - Book Review

It’s the UK publication day for The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (out June 4th in the USA). My longer review of the book can be found on Fantasy Faction, but just wanted to give a short review here and post the trailer.

The Time Traveler's Wife meets The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in this story of a time-travelling serial killer who is impossible to trace--until one of his victims survives.

In Depression-era Chicago, Harper Curtis finds a key to a house that opens on to other times. But it comes at a cost. He has to kill the shining girls: bright young women, burning with potential. He stalks them through their lives across different eras until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and starts hunting him back. Working with an ex-homicide reporter who is falling for her, Kirby has to unravel an impossible mystery.

THE SHINING GIRLS is a masterful twist on the classic serial killer tale: a violent quantum leap featuring a memorable and appealing girl in pursuit of a deadly criminal. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

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The Shining Girls is one of those books that mixes genres and does so very successfully. It’s a crime/thriller/urban-fantasy focussing on a serial killer and the girl who wants to catch him, with the element of time travel thrown in. Mixing time travel with a serial killer is a genius idea – the murderer, Harper Curtis, leaves bodies in different times, hopping back and forth through Chicago from the 20s to the 90s leaving no trail that the police can follow. There’s only one clue – the objects that Harper takes from each victim and leaves on the body of another, objects that are out of time.

Harper doesn’t choose his victims; his time-travelling house does it for him. Yes, you heard that right – a time-travelling house. There’s an element of fatalism in this, as Harper targets his victims because he has already killed them. There is a display of mementos in a bedroom of the house; when he stumbles across it he feels the objects’ owners calling out to him, to murder them and resolve the time loop. This is why they shine. Time travel mixes well with the idea of the serial killer as someone who feels compelled to kill their targets. Time travel also allows the author to show Chicago through the years, providing a fascinating look at the city and how it changed through time, as well as some of the ways that history seems to repeat itself.

And the magical time-travelling house? Never fully explained, but linked to Harper’s psychotic, cruel character – the house is just as malevolent as he, and a really creepy presence throughout the story. I also loved the combination of magic with time travel. This kind of genre blending is something that I really enjoy.

The story is pretty violent in places, and there are many disturbing elements. The serial killer targets women exclusively, and sometimes the murders are described graphically. For me, this was countered by Lauren Beukes’ extraordinary ability to make the reader care about each victim in so few words, giving each a strong voice, as well as the fact that the murders are never glamorised and Harper is not at all sympathetic, even in his point of view chapters. And then there is Kirby, the girl who got away, who refuses to be a victim, and who is determined to catch Harper. Her interactions with Dan, a reporter who she hopes will help her with the case, bring the book to life, ensuring that it is not simply a stream of killings. However, if you think graphic descriptions of violence might make you too uncomfortable, or if you don’t enjoy serial killer thrillers, perhaps give this one a miss.

I really enjoyed this book. I was completely gripped the whole way through, staying up late to see how it would end (a very good ending, I thought). It’s exciting, well-paced, sometimes disturbing, sometimes uplifting, with some good characters and a fantastic setting.

Thank you to Little, Brown and Company and NetGalley for providing a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

And here is the book trailer:

What Makes You Die - Book Review

What Makes You Die
by Tom Piccirilli

To see more is to find oblivion...

Tommy Pic’s hallucinations come and go and leave sticky notes for him during his bipolar swings. Coming out of a blackout in an unfamiliar psychiatric ward, Tommy Pic awakes to his missing childhood love, his dead brother, his alive family, and a message from his agent that his latest screenplay may yet be his ticket back to Hollywood fame and fortune. If only he could remember writing it.

Searching out the hallucinations that will write Acts 2 and 3 of the screenplay that will oust Zypho as his best-known work, Tommy goes chasing his kidnapped childhood love, a witch from the magic shop, the komodo dragon he tried to cut out of his gut on Christmas Eve.

...This is what makes you die. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

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What Makes You Die is a strange book. It’s one of those stories that’s hard to say what it’s actually about. It’s about ghosts, witches, a prehistoric monster living inside a person, and a mysterious self-writing script. It’s about loss, the disappearance of a young girl, mental illness, and a failing writing career. It’s about all those things and yet it’s not really about any of them.

Tommy Pic is a desperate character who seems to be drifting in and out of sanity on the edge of nervous breakdown. He sees the ghosts of his dead family members and friends everywhere, and there is a pre-historic komodo dragon living in his intestines. At points it is very hard to tell just what is part of his extreme paranoia and what might be a real vision, or whether everything is completely in his head. Reality and the fantastical are blurred so much in the story that symbols and metaphor have a very real life of their own, and trying to decide exactly what’s real and what isn’t would probably be missing the point.

Tommy is coping with depression, with a hole that the loss of his father has left inside him, with feelings of inadequacy and despair brought on by a failing writing career, and with the ongoing mystery of what really happened to a girl – a friend he loved – who disappeared in his childhood. When he stumbles across a Wicca shop next to his agent’s office, he becomes involved with a young witch. She sees his ghosts, and the dragon in his gut, and is determined to help him. What ensues is very odd, but leads Tommy through a path of recovery and self-discovery, or perhaps re-self-discovery, to gain a sense of purpose again. It’s clever and entertaining, and will certainly leave you with a lot to think about at the end.

The book is very well written, with a poetic and almost noir-like style, and Tommy’s character is completely honest, right down to the obviously self-destructive behaviour. He can be frustrating at points, and extremely self-obsessed at others, but his story is always compelling. He’s spiralling into insanity but at the same time is capable of some sharp observations about the world and the people in it, making him a fascinating character to see through the eyes of. I also really enjoyed the humour in the book; it was knowing and sometimes a little dark, and it complemented the plot very well. There were some points where the pacing seemed slightly off to me, and occasional sections where the plot seemed to wander off to the side a little unnecessarily, which I thought could have been tightened up a bit. These were only small niggles, however.

Nothing is ever really quite what it seems in the story, leaving the reader to interpret much of what happens according to their own reading. I found what I thought was quite a glaring inconsistency in Tommy’s mother’s account of Kathy Lark’s disappearance (she says that Tommy was with her when she vanished but later seems to contradict herself when Tommy makes an unwelcome accusation). What exactly did happen there? Suggestions of Tommy’s loose grip on reality, a disturbing cover-up, a missed plot hole, or something else? I think I’m leaning towards the first, but with this kind of book it’s very hard to tell, and the story actually benefits from its unanswered questions anyway.

It would be very hard to pin this into a specific genre. Its supernatural elements are clearly metaphors – in fact, the whole story and the concept of the mysteriously written script can be seen as one larger metaphor – but it would be far too simplistic to say that this is all it is. I think it’s enjoyable on several levels, with a strong central character and interesting themes. It reminded me more of short stories than novels that I have read, having that short story quality of feeling like being part of something larger, of being about more than itself, of strong character-focus, and of defying traditional story structure as well as genre. It’s also a very short book, a novella really, and I think it was exactly the right length for the story being told.

This is a very interesting book that blurs supernatural elements, metaphor and reality, creating a surreal and engaging character-focussed tale about a man emerging from depression to find a sense of purpose and belonging once again. Incorporating elements of fantasy, horror, crime and noir, I think it could appeal to fans of many different genres. It might leave the reader with a lot of questions at the end, so for those who like straight, non-confusing narratives, this is probably best avoided. For others, there is a lot to think about and to love in this unique, well-written and surprising book.


Thank you to Apex Book Company for providing a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.