Evil Genius: A Novel

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant novel about a young woman’s quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies along the way

It’s 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be married to Drew, a man who says he loves her. But Celia’s contentment with her little life is shattered when a woman she knows is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. What would that be like, Celia wonders, to die—or kill—for love? What would it be like to live each moment passionately and with full knowledge that each breath is bringing her closer to her final breath?

Before Celia knows it her musings about love-and-death show more happenings are bleeding into daily life. She’s practicing her marksmanship at a local gun range. She's searching for a love tryst of her very own. She's thinking about how good it would feel to bury something sharp inside her domineering husband’s ear. It’s all pretend, though, until the night comes when Celia finally goes too far, and she and Drew are set on a deadly collision course.

Exhilarating, surreal, and bitingly clever, Evil Genius is a comic noir about obsession and desire—and what happens when a sweetly seditious young woman dares to imagine a better life for herself.

Claire Oshetsky is also the author of the novels Poor Deer and Chouette, which was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm an Oshetsky fan. Chouette and Poor Deer (review links above) were excellent reads for a lover of storytelling that blends noir and surreal and pieces of stream-of-consciousness. I'm here for the women who, for varying reasons not least including men being obliviously privileged and uniformly clueless, don't get their feet under themselves. Identities are always under construction, never more so than when the identity is most rigidly brandished at the world. Those like "my Drew" as our PoV character, Celia, thinks of her controlling husband, are fragile masks that must constantly be reinforced...at Celia's expense in this case. It's not an uncommon trait, this...I was the raw material from which my mother's controlling abuse drew her rigidity, masked her awfulness from outsiders.

In this tale of obsession, cruelty, and how we create ourselves in response to outside pressures meeting a core of resistance, and how very much pressure that can require. Celia does not seem aware of how deep her well of rage is. Celia, under "my Drew" as lord and master, touches that rage at last...she has the example of her quite spectacularly murdered co-worker to create urgency in her feelings about "my Drew." It is a spiral up, from touching the rage and the hatred in her to dreamimg of murdering him with a nail file to the ear to taking a ride home from an attractive stranger on her commuter train to buying a weapon to taking the initiative to set up a meeting with a man she's never met but deals with on the phone a lot. It's clear the cork's popped on a lifetime of swallowed emotional abuse and neglect and victimization.

And she's only nineteen.

What keeps me Oshetskying every time I can is Celia and her half-siblings who are all Author Claire's brain children. I find new ways to enjoy off-the-beam points of view with each story she writes. Here's Celia in progress: "What Drew didn’t know is that I couldn’t be shamed that way. Not any longer...I would never again let myself be shamed by my body, or its functions, or its urges." Brava, kid! You're only nineteen and light-years ahead of most people's final destinations. It's of a piece with Celia's object of fetishization, the Barbie doll. It requires no huge leap to see how a bizarre doll...collection...stands in for the need to discover safety, and how little actual use it is. How little it takes, a few ounces of plastic molded into a distorted human shape, to buy a sham safety from the very real storms around her, these golems of industrial feminization in their legions pacifying the susceptible intentional victims with their infinite manipulability (plasticity in its original sense.).

Author Claire doesn't say this. That would be rude. Author Claire might be rowdy but she is not rude. Her ability to slit the character envelope with a rapier of witty, unsentimental observation while releasing the evil genius inside Celia to perform the real function of protection is *chef's kiss*. I've seen a few reviews that interpret the title in a more comic-book way, resembling a supervillain; I suppose that's inevitable as this is what most people are familiar with. It is, however, not at all what the story delivers, whereas I see the genius loci in every shred of this story's fabric. Follow the link above after reading Evil Genius to see if you find similar echoes.

It's a rare thing for me to say: I wish I could forget this story entirely so I could read it for the first time all over again. I want to re-meet Doggo. And Celia. (Not Sock Man, though.) show less

Claire Oshetsky is some kind of genius of this strange little genre of which she seems to be the only member at present. This brief book is madcap and brutal, funny and angry, self-contained and a little crazy and extremely clever. It does not shy away from strangeness. Oshetsky presents her quirky, likeable, broken and mildly unreliable narrator, Celia Dent, and I can only embrace her and speed along on this dark little Hitchcock-noir escapade that ends (no spoilers) just like I hoped it would. It felt liberating and entirely original, modern in tone and deeply set in the 1970s in spirit. I don't know how to tell you whether you'll love it or hate it but I, personally, kind of want to start back over right now and go through it again.

With dark humor, Evil Genius’ weird girl historical lit fic comic noir tackles themes of domestic violence, friendship, obsession, and revenge in 1974 San Francisco. Oshetsky’s writing style revealed a lot of what was going on in the head of the main character, Celia, a particularly unreliable narrator. Abuse is normalized for her. She has dark fantasies. The slow build-up had me invested, waiting for the breaking point. Ultimately, the ending wasn’t as climactic as I anticipated and felt rather convenient. Even so, this was an entertaining read. I look forward to checking out Oshetsky’s other work.

A darkly comic, action-packed novel, including questionable decisions, cruel and illegal acts, some convenient coincidences, and shocking consequences. 19-year-old Celia is overcoming trauma, wreaking revenge, and striving for a free, happy, and authentic life.

The opening chapter is titled “The Cliffhanger”, which proved true: I read the whole book in a single sitting. Randall is telling coworkers how Vivienne Bianco was murdered by her husband while he was hiding under the bed. He's cut short before he can finish the story, but it sets Celia thinking about life, death, and murder.
“It’s a strange but true fact that a typical person living in these modern times will cross paths with thirty-six actual, in-the-flesh murderers in show more their lifetime, along with seventy-seven people who are destined to be murdered.”

It’s a distraction from her dull job in a telephone company billing office in 1974 San Francisco:
“On the third floor of a six-floor building on Fourth Street.”
People call with sob stories to excuse late payment, usually in vain. The staff “rip their lips” (cut their telephone contract) with relish, and joke about heavy-breathers who also call.

Image: Cut off: an old-fashioned landline handset, with a severed cord: freedom, or tragedy in waiting?

Celia never knew her father, her mother died recently after paranoia and mental health problems, and she is newly married:
“My Drew never once hit me.”
But he does push, demean, control, and gaslight her.

In her reverie, she plays with counterfactual versions of who was manipulating who in the unfinished story, and wonders what it would be like to murder someone. She wants to know more about Randall and Vivienne, so she starts socialising more with coworkers. One thing leads to another…

Nothing in the narrative is wasted, and it’s great fun, but with plenty of depth as well.

Note I read an uncorrected proof; the final publication may differ slightly.

See also

• This is lighter, and in some ways more realistic, than Oshetsky’s other two novels, though quirkiness and a love of birds and animals is common to all. See my reviews:
• Chouette, 4*, HERE.
• Poor Deer, 5*, HERE.

• For a different take on dull office life, see Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, which I reviewed HERE.

• The thrill, sometimes sexual, of thinking about and seeing sudden death reminded me of JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which I reviewed HERE, and his Crash, which I’ve not read.

• Reading this, I recalled the (fictitious) conundrum of whether Ronald Opus’s death was murder or suicide. See HERE. show less

This was a fun and disturbing read. Set in San Francisco in 1974, 19 year old Celia works at a telephone company and is married to Drew. Drew is controlling and constantly gaslights her. When Celia learns of a co-worker’s murder by her husband, Celia begins to do a lot of thinking about her marriage and her future.

Arise Daughter of Dirk!
A review of the Ecco hardcover edition (February 17, 2026) released simultaneously with the eBook/audiobook.

I remembered what I had always known: I was Daughter of Dirk. I was Minion of the Crab Queen. I was in a full fever. I wasn’t a normal girl. I was supernatural. I was uncanny. I was magnificent.

How to sum up Evil Genius? Perhaps as a quirky empowerment story set in 1974 San Francisco at a time when home phones were still the standard and prepayments didn't exist? 19-year-old telephone billing operator Celia Dent is stuck in an intimidating marriage with "her Drew," and through friends at the phone company starts to break free from it all.

Her journey takes a path through the purchase of a Scottish dirk & show more target="_top">sgian-dubh combo (not sold separately), a co-worker's story of a fatal ménage à trois, various interactions and even deadly encounters with crank phone customers and callers, nights on the town with the girls, an attempted assault by a not-so-caring dog owner and an eventual escape to a run on the beach (I'm leaving out many key plot points and reveals).

This was an exhilarating read which more than lived up to the 5-star review by GR friend Jodi, who alerted me to it. Author Claire Oshetsky was a completely new name to me, but I will be sure to look out for her in the future.

Trivia and Links
Author Claire Oshetsky is on Goodreads under the pseudonym of Lark Benobi with a mysterious triple Capricorn zodiac avatar ♑♑♑ and has published at least one book under that name [book:The Book of Dog by Lark Benobi|40172259]. show less

This is historical fiction told by an unreliable narrator reflecting on her time as a young wife in the seventies and the turmoil that follows from her dissatisfaction with the life she’s supposed to want. I was bored for most of the first half. I found the narrator hard to engage with, and I kept waiting for things to shift into something more interesting. A few moments made me think we were finally getting there, but then it would slide right back into the same dull rhythm. It’s possible audiobook just wasn’t the best format for me. Since she’s both unreliable and not especially relatable, it was hard to get invested, even when more dramatic things happened. I didn’t find it exhilarating or clever. Where was the evil show more genius?

Thanks to NetGalley and Ecco for access to this audiobook. show less