The Shining Girls

This week, I read The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes.  There was a lot of hype about this book a while back, and I just now got around to reading it.

This is the story of a serial killer who discovers a way to travel through time.  He uses this new found ability to hunt down and murder "the Shining Girls," girls who radiate potential across the 20th century.  In true psycho killer style, he takes an object from each girl, leaving it behind on the next target to make a "constellation," and in the process leaving items impossibly out of time.  When Kirby survives her attack, she starts her own hunt to track him down.

The main thing that struck me about this book was how harsh it was. Even excluding the graphic, pervasive violence, the descriptions themselves are crude and bitter.  This is less sci-fi time travel shenanigans and more literary horror.

"She grins, the polka dots of her freckles drawing up into Dutch apple cheeks, revealing bright white teeth.  'Nah, Rachel says I'm not allowed to play with matches.  Not after last time.'  She has one skewed canine, slightly overlapping her incisors. And the smile more than makes up for her brackwater brown eyes, because now he can see the spark behind them."

Half the book is told from the serial killer's point of view, and he completely lacks empathy, so it makes sense for that tone to be there.  It expresses his character in nauseating clarity.  On the other hand, it makes for a rough read. 

Kirby is great.  She's a survivor, tough and snarky and desperate and reckless.  The time travel was interesting too.  It made the killer even more terrifying that he could avoid capture or identification by moving forward or back a decade.  His looping movements through time and his interactions with people and objects were neatly crafted by the author (if a little sporadic by the killer).  On the other hand, he never took advantage of the fact that he could kill at literally any time, because his craziness decided (or he was told by the magical powers that controlled the time travel) that there were rules, that certain specific times called to him.  So it ended up not being about time travel and more that time travel was there, hovering menacingly in the background.

I did like how this book was set in Chicago and felt like it was set in Chicago with characters who lived there.  A lot of books pick the most touristy of tourist spots and get the details gratingly wrong.  Maybe that was the case here, but they were the tourist spots of the 40s or the 70s and didn't bother me since my experience as someone who lives here wouldn't have a chance to rub up against those scenes and recoil that that's not how I-90 works.  It surprised me to get to the end and find a huge acknowledgements section about Beukes' research, how she visited the locations and interviewed experts.  I had assumed from reading that she just lived here (and was around since the 30s?).  So way to go on that.

This book leaves me with questions that don't have answers.  The shining girls show "potential" but it's often hard to tell how that potential could manifest itself.  Does this mean they're being killed before they can change the world, meaning there's an alternate timeline out there where these women did tremendous things?  Or is the serial killer just crazy as crazy can be and all this "shining" he senses is a grand psychotic delusion? 

Then: is this commentary on violence against women, or yet another uncomfortable book that relies on such violence?

In the end, this one was just too graphic to really enjoy.

***

Next week: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North.