And so to the last of our reviews for Halloween 2019.
He clenches the orange plastic pony in the pocket of his sports coat. It is sweaty in his hand. Mid-summer here, too hot for what he’s wearing. But he has learned to put on a uniform for this purpose; jeans in particular. He takes long strides – a man who walks because he’s got somewhere to be, despite his gimpy foot. Harper Curtis is not a moocher. And time waits for no one. Except when it does.
— first paragraph of The Shining Girls
Let’s unpack that.
The chapter heading is “Harper 1974” and the paragraph indicates Harper Curtis wants to present a certain image. He has acquired clothing to fit that image – jeans and a sports coat – presumably to blend in with his surroundings. He wants to look purposeful and show that his bad foot doesn’t slow him or define him. Still, most telling is his curious attitude toward time.
This is Beukes implying the importance of time in this novel and her plot is simple enough: Time traveling serial killer, Harper, being hunted by surviving victim, Kirby Mizrachi. The short, precisely written chapters are filled with enough period-setting description in and around Chicago to ground the reader in whichever decade Harper appears, and enough character development, particularly of the victims, to engage sympathy and ratchet up the suspense. Add in some pithy commentary like, “She would disappear folded like origami into her own dreams” (describing Kirby’s mother) and you have a read that is effective and affecting, written in prose that moves you along briskly.
The Shining Girls is one in a long line of novels featuring serial killers, the boogey men who keep popping up in the wake of The Silence of the Lambs, but in an interview appended to the paperback edition, Beukes states, “I wanted to use time travel as a way of exploring how much has changed (or depressingly stayed the same) over the course of the twentieth century, especially for women, and subvert the serial-killer genre by keeping the focus much more on the victims and examining what real violence is and what it does to us.” Harper might not define it as hatred, but when he sees his targets, to him they shine, and all are women who live unconventional lives for their times, surviving by bucking the dominant attitudes of what women should and shouldn’t do.
The main action takes place in 1992. After the attack in 1989, Kirby dropped out of school, later wheedling her way into a Chicago newspaper as she investigates, certain she was not a target of convenience if only because the attacker knew ahead of time he had to disable her beloved dog. At the paper she makes sure to meet Dan Velasquez who had reported on the attack, and he begins to mold her into a reporter as she pieces together what her attacker is like, how he operates. Beukes simultaneously makes clear that while the damage Harper has caused Kirby turns her into the hunter, it also leaves her with tunnel vision. The other victims receive less space, but equally clear-eyed and empathetic attention, showing them flawed and relatable, from the “Glow Girl” dancer, Janette, risking radiation poisoning to entertain, to Klara, a war widow with children to feed and earning the chance to be a welder where no other Blacks are allowed, to Willie, an architect when few women have that opportunity, bucking the expectations and biases of the firm’s other architects and the day’s political climate.
Late in the book the story becomes a chase, Harper aware of Kirby and Kirby becoming aware of her attacker’s true character and abilities. A blurb on the cover from Gillian Flynn sums up Beukes’ approach succinctly, “This author’s got an intriguing style of dealing with slightly surreal things in very real ways.” Harper moves in loops of time controlled by a passion and a power he doesn’t understand situated in a house that shelters him, and the nature of that house and how it can assert such control when it is finally revealed is chilling.
If you’re looking for October or Halloween reading, I would strongly recommend The Shining Girls, an unconventional thriller.
THE SHINING GIRLS by Lauren Beukes
(2014; Mulholland Books)
400 pages
ISBN: 978-0316216869
Review by Randy Money
