The Shining Girls

A high concept in a book or a film is more likely to make me leery than excited, but there's no denying that when a talented writer gets hold of one and turns it upside down and inside out out it's a real thrill and a privilege to behold. Lauren Beukes has the high concept and the talent and thus we get Shining Girls, about a killer who stalks his victims through time and the girl who got away and devotes her life to hunting a man who does the impossible.

The exact mechanism whereby Harper Curtis departs from Chicago in 1931 to spread horror and grief across a century is left unexplained, but Beukes constructs an intricate ingenious tale around his depradations and his madness and the madness of time travel and the efforts of spiky and show more hard-edged Kirby Mazrachi to prove her killer has killed before and will kill again with evidence that is either contradictory or impossible. But Harper thinks she's dead, and when he discovers the truth, how will she hide from an impossible killer?

Excellent thriller, skillfully constructed, thoroughly researched filled with distinctive voices and mounting suspense. show less

Deserves every bit of the buzz – and then some!

My introduction to Lauren Beukes came in the form of Broken Monsters, an ARC of which I had the pleasure of reviewing last month. Though I fell in love with Beukes’ writing style – the playful use of pop culture references, the skillful interweaving of multiple narratives and POVs, the casual interrogation of racism and sexism – the particular blend of fantasy/SF and crime fiction found in Broken Monsters didn’t quite do it for me. Thinking that it might work better in The Shining Girls, I bumped it up to the top of my TBR pile. I know it’s a little tired to say that this book shines, but. Yeah, it kind of does.

Harper is a psychopath living in a Chicago Hooverville circa 1931 show more when he robs a blind woman of her coat – in the pocket of which he finds a key, which leads him to the House. His House. By all appearances a dilapidated shack, once Harper steps through the front door, it magically transforms itself a mansion - shiny, new, and opulent - just for him. And when he passes through the front door again, he can step out onto any time he can imagine…just so long as the day falls somewhere between 1931 and 1993.

On the wall of the upstairs bedroom thrums a constellation, the stars of which are names of women (scrawled and scratched in Harper’s own handwriting, natch) and their associated objects. Harper instinctively knows what he must do: find the women – these glowing stars – whenever they exist, and snuff out their lights. Redistribute these anachronistic objects. Close the loop.

A prolific time-traveling serial killer, Harper meets his match in Kirby, the only one of his victims to escape alive (thanks in no small part to her heroic dog Tokyo Speedracer Mazrachi; I’ve earmarked the name for my next rescue pup!). When the police’s investigation stalls out, she secures a spot as an intern at The Chicago Sun-Times so that she can work alongside veteran crime reporter Dan Velasquez, who covered her case several years earlier – even though he’s since moved on to the sports beat. As Harper steps in and out of historic Chicago, his and Kirby’s paths converge, with all roads leading to the House.

The Shining Girls reminded me of Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 in the best way possible. Like The Shining Girls, NOS4A2 features a psychopath serial killer who, aided by a magical object (in this case, a 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith) travels the ‘verse (innerscapes) in search of young victims (whose psychic energy he drains to power his ride). Aided by her Raleigh Tuff Burner, Victoria McQueen is the only one of Manx’s victims to escape – and, as a young woman, she will prove his undoing. The parallels are many, yet each story is its own, beautiful beast.

I especially love how the House’s doors offer a glimpse into seminal moments in American history: the Chicago World Fair, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, WWII, Jim Crow segregation, McCarthyism. Harper’s victims come from all walks of life and defy easy categorization: Zora Ellis Jordan is a young mother and war widow working at the Chicago Bridge & Iron Company, “weld[ing] the gun turrets that will tear those Nazi shits into mincemeat.” One of the company’s only African American employees (in truth, Chicago Bridge & Iron Company had no black welders in 1943), she and her four children are barred from staying in on-site employee housing; instead, she’s forced to rent a house in nearby Seneca, a one-hour+ trip by foot. Willie is an architect – a female architect being a rarity in 1954 – who is terrified of being labeled a “Communist” due to her sexual preferences and liberal leanings. Alice is a trans woman recently fired from the carnival when she meets Harper for the first time – and mistakes him for the man of her dreams.

There’s a wonderful breadth of diversity here that’s both appropriate and refreshing. As she did in Broken Monsters, Beukes examines the history and dynamics of racism and sexism (not to mention homophobia and transphobia) without being heavy-handed. The interrogation is simply part of the story, and blends seamlessly with the fictional elements and larger plot.

After finishing The Shining Girls, I went out and snatched up the rest of Beuke’s oeuvre. She’s quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. Whether you’re drawn to the science fiction/time travel, crime fiction, historical fiction, or social justice elements of the story (or e) all of the above), I cannot recommend The Shining Girls highly enough!

http://www.easyvegan.info/2014/10/13/the-shining-girls-by-lauren-beukes/ show less

Harper, the anti-hero of Lauren Beukes’s terrific novel The Shining Girls, is a killer. He chooses his victims when they are just girls, giving them something special – a toy, something that glitters, a hair decoration — and speaking with them as if he is a friend, even introducing himself. Sometimes he finds it hard to control his violence during these visits, thinking about how easily he could kill them then and there, as well as the nauseating details of how he would do it. Then, when the girls are in their twenties or a bit younger, Harper returns to them and dispatches them, making a clean escape every time. He leaves behind a souvenir, an artifact from another victim. And he is nearly impossible to catch.

The reason he is show more able to visit his victims as children, find them again as adults, and elude capture, is that he has a time portal. He happens upon it accidentally in 1931, when he breaks into a boarded-up and condemned house in Chicago. He kills the occupant of the house and discovers its odd properties. More, he finds the proper dress and currency for other times. And he finds the room in which the history of the shining girls of the title — the girls he will kill — has been documented in his own handwriting. We never learn the origins of this room or this house, or how the time portal works, but we don’t really need that information. What we need to know is that Harper is a psychopath who has just stumbled onto a means to commit serial murder that is just about perfect.

One of Harper’s victims is Kirby. But he messed up with her; she survived, her toughness serving her well. In 1992, she’s a college student who is interning with the Chicago Sun-Times, using her position with the newspaper to investigate her own attempted murder. She is assigned to Dan Velasquez at her request. Dan is a sports reporter, which ought to make it hard to get access to information about murders, but Dan used to be a homicide reporter and Kirby has done her homework. Right up front she makes it clear that she doesn’t care how the Cubs are doing, or even know the first thing about baseball. She’s only asked for Dan because there were no internships with homicide reporters available. Dan covered her attempted murder, and he becomes intrigued with her search for her would-be murderer — and with her.

The Shining Girls seesaws from Kirby’s viewpoint to Harper’s and back again, and throws in a few more viewpoints from time to time. Beukes is careful to keep us oriented by heading each chapter with the name of the viewpoint character and the date, so that the reader is never left scratching her head to try to figure out where and when she is (a flaw of many novels about time travel). The characterization is sharp, especially as to Kirby; she is not the standard loveable heroine of many tales, but a young woman who is determined to get what she wants and not particularly concerned about what she needs to do to get it. I enjoyed her strength and determination, even as her hardness became more apparent.

But the real star of this book is the meticulous plotting. We follow Harper as he hops around in time, committing a murder now and a murder then, leaving clues that make no real sense to the police. Better, we follow Kirby as she unravels the Gordian knot of these crimes, making connections that make no temporal sense (how can the police explain a Jackie Robinson baseball card left at a murder scene years before Robinson was in the major leagues?), but following the clues where they lead her, no matter how impossible the solution might seem. Beukes dances us through this complicated scenario with seeming ease; I spotted no missteps that might trip up either a thriller reader or a science fiction reader.

The Shining Girls is an exciting blending and mashing of genres. I expect that science fiction, fantasy and horror readers are more likely to be satisfied with this book that thriller readers, as there is no mystery about who the bad guy is and no real suspense about what the climax of the book will be. The joy here is in watching it all unfold, in seeing how the clues link up and lead Kirby to an impossible solution. And it’s a considerable joy; The Shining Girls was one of the best books of 2013.

Originally published at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/the-shining-girls/. show less

I just complained, in my last review (of the abjectly horrible [b:Stephen King shot John Lennon|6562238|Stephen King shot John Lennon|Steve Lightfoot|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1251977401s/6562238.jpg|6755076]), that Goodreads wouldn't allow negative ratings. Now, it's time to complain again, because this book is at least a seven on a five scale.

There are many ways to rate how good a story is. But for me, one of the immediate things to consider as I finish a book is to consider its standing in one of four categories:

1 - I could never have written this (part one): This means almost everything is wrong. The story is terrible, the writing is terrible. Why would someone even publish this? I don't put a lot of books into this category, show more simply because I try to avoid them.

2 - I could have written something better than this. This means it was a good enough idea to get me to read it, but, in my opinion, the author botched it. I tend to put quite a few books in this category.

3 - I could have written this, and damn, I wish I did. Great story, well-executed. I put fewer books into this category, but they are ones I love, because they give me hope that I will one day have a book that is shelved here by other readers.

4 - I could never have written this (part two): This means the story is absolutely brilliant, something that leaves me awestruck with wonder. And then the writer goes one better and pulls it off. They take this wonderful concept and make it real. Very few books make it here. Very few.

And I know that this is a highly conceited rating system, because it all comes back to me. I get that. Still, I think any writer, aspiring or otherwise may do this at least once in their life.

That being said, The Shining Girls just got added to that rarest of categories. I can't tell you how many times, as I made my way through this story that I thought, Oh damn! That's awesome! in relation to a plot point, or a line of characterization, or a reveal.

Seriously, Lauren Beukes, where have you been all my life?

I first came across the author with her amazing [b:Broken Monsters|20706269|Broken Monsters|Lauren Beukes|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1394562848s/20706269.jpg|27869457] (which you should go read now. No, I mean right now. And I didn't think she could top that one. Then I went back to the book before. This one.

Having read them in reverse chronological order, I can see some of the seeds that would blossom into Broken Monsters, but the brilliance of this one, not just the idea of a time-travelling killer, but Beukes' flawless execution of the storyline...wow.

This would be an easy story to let go off the rails...the constant hopping around in time, the many characters, the shifting viewpoints...but the author keeps a firm and steady hand on the proceedings.

I could say more, but it'll just spiral into incoherent rambling. Just go read it.

My God, my God, my God. I loved this book. show less

Well-written, interesting, exceptional at depicting extreme violence and cruelty, but ends with a whimper rather than a bang. I’d have liked closure on the House, and its existence. Harper was just a serial killer, it was the House that made him special, and we never find out why.

While I was in the middle of this one, a co-worker asked me what I was reading.

"It's about a time-traveling serial killer," I said.

"Oh," he replied wryly. "There's an idea that hasn't been done before."

It has, of course. But this novel, about a man from the 1930s who commits gruesome murders across the next six decades and the survivor of one of his attacks who is trying to track him down without knowing his crucial secret, feels fresh enough that it's easy to forget that fact.

And I'm very impressed with how easy it makes its complicated premise and even more complicated structure work. We move rapidly back and forth from one time to another, from one perspective to another, in a decidedly non-linear fashion. Causes and effects are out show more of order, jumbled up, or folded in on each other until there's no telling them apart at all. There's no carefully laid-out exposition of how the time travel works and what its rules are, and only the barest hint of an explanation as to why it happens at all. And yet, it all reads clearly and easily and never remotely seems difficult to follow. I'm not at all sure how Beukes pulls that off, but my hat's off to her.

I'm also slightly impressed by how she depicts the killer's POV, with his utterly matter-of-fact sociopathy. Impressed, but a little disturbed. As, indeed, the whole thing is disturbing, and, I admit, I can't entirely decide whether it's disturbing in a good or a bad way. It feels unpleasantly voyeuristic, watching this guy cut up women throughout recent history, and while there is a nice little supernatural twist at the end that I liked, I'm not sure there's ultimately a payoff to it all that makes me feel like I watched all that happen for a reason. Then again, maybe the complete lack of reasons (or causes) is part of the point. I'm not at all sure.

Rating: The stuff that impresses me definitely impresses me enough to give this a 4/5, despite any lingering uncertainties. show less

I have a new must-read author! This is not her first book, and while I was aware of her earlier books, I hadn't gotten around to reading them, or even getting them. But the plot of this caught my attention: time traveling serial killer. That covers science fiction and mysteries, two of my favorite genres to read. As it turns out, the science fiction is more fantasy due to there being no explanation for the killer's ability to travel forward from the 1930s. All he needs do is be in the house he found, think of a time to visit, then step outside.

Through a series of events that seem pre-determined, petty criminal Harper Curtis comes into possession of a coat during the Great Depression and in a pocket of that coat is a key to a house, a show more house that seems to draw him to it once he puts on the coat. In a bedroom in the house, he finds artifacts pinned to a wall, with names beside them, names of girls written in his handwriting. Names he hasn't written yet. Names of the Shining Girls he knows he must kill.

In the early 1990s, Kirby Mazrachi is a journalism student hellbent on finding the man with a limp who nearly killed her four years earlier. She enlists the reluctant assistance of the reporter who had covered her case and together... I won't say more because this book is too clever, too mind-bending to spoil. The killings are violent and the writing is graphic in that regard, but the prose hums along, painting pictures that bring each of the Shining Girls to life before their encounter with Harper. Beukes makes you care about them and their pre-destined fate. And in Kirby, she has created a protagonist you can't help rooting for, a feisty, take-no-prisoners young woman determined to control her own fate.

The other joy of the book is how Beukes ties up the loose ends, playing with time paradoxes as Harper jumps back and forth through time during his killing spree. If you don't mind scenes of graphic violence, I can't recommend this book highly enough. show less