The Murders of Molly Southbourne

This is a very nice genre-bender, parts SF, Fantasy, and Horror, all surrounding the multiple instances of Molly every time she bleeds. Each time rising from the ground or floor to become a complete copy of herself.

This isn't a humorous novella, however. Indeed, the creep-factor is turned up rather high. Every time a duplicate comes up, she's forced to murder herself.

It works well on several levels. The literal is bad enough, managing to reach over to normalcy while being very horrific, but when it becomes a metaphor, a branching out into anything we must murder within ourselves, it also works wonderfully. It might be a desire or a drive, an orientation or even just a natural preference or religious observation...

And yet it still works. show more :)

And it works very well as a straight horror, too. Being all-out creepy and disturbing is the name of the game. A subtext isn't necessary to enjoy this. Just figuring out who is narrating should keep anyone endlessly fascinating.

Self-examination is a real horrorshow. :) show less

This is a twisted little nugget of a book. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything else like it. Based on the blurb, one would expect to read a suspense novel or a thriller, but it really wasn’t either. Molly Southbourne faces nearly impossible circumstances, because her blood can spontaneously reproduce into murderous replicas of herself. I say murderous, but they don’t set their sights on any old target, just on Molly herself. Despite this, Molly chooses to leave behind the insular life she has lived on her parents’ farm and attend university. In the end, The Murders of Molly Southbourne is a story about a girl facing factors outside her control and still trying to find a way to live life on her own terms.
I would recommend show more this book to more mature readers who don’t mind delving into the gray areas of morality. There is extensive bloodshed, but it is acknowledged in a very clinical manner, so it doesn’t come across as being gory. show less

A bold novella that, despite its splatter-punk attire and childhood narrative, is neither a horror story nor a coming of age story, but a ruthlessly wrought thought-experiment, soaked in blood.

This was a beautifully written and deeply strange novella. It started in bloody chaos that challenged me to live with not understanding what was going on, to let the strangeness and blood gush over me as I sifted it for meaning.

Before I could make sense of the situation, I was dropped into a retrospective narrative of childhood. This should have been more familiar territory but it was not. It was a childhood bounded by simple but inscrutable rules and filled with violent death and unacknowledged secrets. Of course, in some ways, all childhoods show more are bounded by the inscrutable and filled with unacknowledged secrets held both the adults and the child. Part of the power of this strange story is how close it is to normality.

The journey to unlocking the rules and secrets of Molly Southbourne's childhood and their consequences led me back to the start, a place I now understood, and then offered one final surprise.

It was a stimulating journey of the kind that classic Science Fiction short stories are made of: relentlessly pursuing the consequences of an original idea. Despite its splatter-punk attire and childhood narrative, this was neither a horror story nor a rites of passage, coming of age story of the kind that builds empathy for the young person coming to adulthood. Rather it was a ruthlessly wrought thought-experiment, soaked in blood.

I realise now that Tade Thompson had signposted his intent with the 'Epigraph', a quote from an eighteenth-century psychologist that I should have paid more attention to. It reads:

'With each failure, each insult, each wound to the psyche, we are created anew. This new self is who we must battle each day or face extinction of the spirit. Writings on the Natural History of the Mind
Theophilus Roshodan, 1789

One of the big debates in psychology is the nature of the self, sometimes seen as reflexive self-defence mechanism conjured by need and sometimes as the heart of cognisance.

'The Murders of Molly Southbourne' takes a look at the concept of self in a very dramatic, very physical way. I think Tade Thompson uses it as an experiment to answer the question 'What if, every time we bled, we were confronted with a new self that wanted to replace us?'

He looks at how we would react to the new selves, at how we would survive at how the new selves would change us and whether the struggle to sustain the self that is constantly challenged and constantly changing, is worth it.

I think it's a sign of his skill that I was so wrapped up the story while reading it, that I only understood that it was a thought experiment when the experiment was over and the results were in.

I think that's because Tade Thompson loves playing with words as much as he loves playing with ideas. He virtually declares as much when he attributes this passion to the deadly, isolated, constantly under threat Molly:

Molly loves reading. Words used to be homework, a chore, but books make words do magic tricks. She loves that writers make words their servants and bend them to their will.

I enjoyed the story for its boldness and its matter-of-fact approach to survival through violence. Molly's parents were a great invention. They create everything Molly is an yet have almost nothing in common with her and almost no understanding of who she is. Tade Thompson takes this common situation and uses it to amplify the strangeness in his story.

I think the ending is one that will either be loved or hated. I liked it. It seemed to me to be a result of the experiment that was credible even though it was unexpected. It also seemed a brave way for a writer to end a story. Of course, being a writer, Tade Thompson also managed to make the ending a great opening to a new story. Some may see that as a cliff-hanger ending. I think we plunged madly over the edge of the cliff and are now surveying the wreckage and looking for survivors.

Tade Thompson has written a second novella, 'The Survival Of Molly Southbourne', which starts where 'The Murders Of Molly Southbourne' ends. I'll be reading it soon. I'm hoping to find that, unlike the 'Murderbot' novellas which felt like a novel served in slices, the next novella will conduct a new experiment. I'm intrigued to know what that will be. show less

A near-enough future novella that blends the horror inherent in a mutating, collapsing Earth and the human response to it with the species-level will to live no matter what.

I was utterly sucked into the narrative early on:

An example has aspects of a thing, but is that the thing itself? The mollys have aspects of Molly, but that doesn't make them Molly, does it?

I'm not going to tell you what mollys are because this is a very difficult concept to get across. I want the whole reading experience to be as full and rich for you as it was for me. And I want to encourage you to spend $3.99 on a novella of surpassing strangeness, violence, and transcendent oddness.

What isn't odd, though sometimes is transcendent, is Author Tade's writing. He show more finds angles and corners where others don't look, or if they look don't see.

Her shoes wait in formation for her feet to quicken them.
***
Alarms are going off like the mating calls of robotic insects.
***
As she cuts the cadavers on the slabs, she realizes there is no sense to be made out of life.

With the exception of one, and only one, hideous and disfiguring instance of the w-bomb, the text is chillingly, even eerily, smooth and flawless. It resembles in its affect the narrative monologues of Rod Serling. You know the point is there, you can see it rising like the number Pi is said to do over all knowledge, glimpses above foggy lowlands of text, but it shifts and your gaze has to slip away from it as you negotiate the steps of the ziggurat.

Climb, I urge you; the view is fine and the journey's toll is just the beginning of a quest. show less

To be fair to Thompson, I had no idea what I was getting myself into with this book. I bought it because I love the Rosewater books, and other people have been saying good things about it.

The opening chapter of this book makes no sense on first read. However, near to the end of the book something became horribly clear, and I had to go back and reread that chapter. Given that it is the framing narrative of the whole story, it shouldn't have worked. And yet. I recommend people read the book before reading any reviews.

Although novella/novelette length, this is a lush and convoluted story with so much detailed world-building and characterisation leaked to the reader a droplet at a time. As a horror story, it works on multiple fascinating show more levels. The surface level body horror is flagged in the blurb on the back of the book. Some of that can be quite visceral.

But in the background is a barely recognised societal and environmental collapse happening. The little bits of that the creep in are sadly entirely credible as the way that life is going. show less

This is very good body horror, about a young woman whose blood generates versions of herself that inevitably become violent, attack her, and must be killed. Reading this story literally raises many questions, but I don't think it's meant to be read literally, given the ambiguity about when and where this is taking place. Metaphorically, this is a horrifying rendition of a reality many of us endure or have endured: the unceasing and often violent murders of aspects of ourselves, both good and bad, so that we can continue to exist. No wonder Molly was exhausted at the end. No wonder we all feel so exhausted.

Can't think of anything I've ever read quite like this! An unusual twist on the coming-of-age novella that reads quickly, but is a complete and satisfying story in its own right.

Molly lives a lonely childhood on a farm, homeschooled by her parents. Her parents give her a shortlist of rules that become normal to her: avoid bleeding at all cost, any blood (a nosebleed, a scraped knee, a dog bite, a paper cut) is to be burned and bleached. If attacked, she is to fight back and if she comes across a pit, she is to call her parents immediately.

Turns out, that any amount of Molly's blood that isn't obliterated quickly will result in the 'seeding' of at least one doppelganger. These pod mollies are murderous and the OG Molly must kill them or show more be killed.

Of course, her condition presents an interesting challenge as she ages, goes through a rebellious period with her parents, and eventually has boyfriends or sexual relationships. The book covers her 'education' about her afflection and how she learns to live with it from childhood through early adulthood.

Horror and a high body count, but less of the grisly sort, more of the unsettling kind. Appropriate for high schoolers on the more mature side--has a couple of fairly graphic sexual scenes and depictions of violence.

Recommended - I came across a reco for it, had never heard of it, likely wouldn't have found on my own, but glad I did! It has that under-the-radar gem kind of feel to it. show less