Oyinkan Braithwaite's MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER (Narr Adepero Oduye)

I've always hated the saying that two people "fight like sisters," though at times I've also been grateful to hear it, once I realized that the kind of guy (it's always a cishet dude) who uses it is one I needn't associate with beyond what's necessary for politeness. Kind of like the guy who spends the whole first date bitching about his ex. There are red flags and then there are gigantic swaths of fabric the color of arterial blood and still wet enough to drip and fully, it sure smells like iron in here all is a sudden...

My Sister, the Serial Killer is first and foremost a novel about sisterhood, about a relatively plain but infinitely capable, patient and compassionate older sister, Korede, and a gorgeous, glamorous and slightly spoiled younger one, Ayoola. Korede works as a nurse in a hospital where she is highly respected, if not exactly universally liked, and is up for a promotion there; Ayoola gets jetted off to places like Dubai for weekend shopping sprees and night life on the arms of rich and shady businessmen. 

Guess which one their mom likes best. 

And which one a handsome doctor who has had Korede friend-zoned for years falls head-over-heels for after meeting her just once.

By the time Dr. Handsome meets Ayoola, though, we have learned that Korede's bombshell sister has an annoying habit of killing her boyfriends "accidentally" and "in self-defense" -- and of relying on her calm and competent, medically trained sibling to help her do away with the evidence and clean everything up.

Now Korede must watch as her crush falls in love with her sister, and seems handpicked by fate to be Ayoola's fifth victim (though at the time they meet, Number Three has only just been pulled out of the trunk of Korede's car and dumped into the lake). 

That all could feel very plot-by-numbers, especially given the short length of the novel (just above four hours in Adupero Odunye's note perfect narration); it could have resulted in a very formulaic novel. Debut novelist Oyinkan Braithwaite, though, saves her book from this fate by giving her point of view character an emotional candor that lets us really feel her conflicts as she goes about her complicated days at work and at home, and by giving us some very unusual and touching plot devices that carry her further into her dilemmas, like a lovely sub-plot concerning Korede's relationship with a coma patient at her hospital. Which sub-plot manages, deftly, to have a significant impact on the main plot. Braithwaite knows what she's doing.

We get to see Korede taking on the unaccustomed mantle of officially acknowledged leadership (having been an obvious but unrewarded leader for years beforehand) at the hospital, struggle with her feelings for Dr. Handsome and her fears for him, and deal with both her deep concern for and growing resentment of Ayoola*, often in the same taut and affecting scene, making My Sister, the Serial Killer a perfect little jewel of a novel that rewards your tiny investment of time in reading it far out of proportion to its brevity. I look forward to more of Braithwaite's work. And I guess I have to tweak my search parameters a bit in future, too.  I obviously don't read enough thrillers, you guys. 

*Beautifully complicated by the fact that part of her objection to the relationship between Dr. Handsome and her sister is that he doesn't love Ayoola for any of the reasons Korede thinks make Ayoola worthy of being loved; at one point when Korede asks him point blank why he loves Ayoola, all he can tell her is that Ayoola is "beautiful and perfect," meaning he doesn't know Ayoola at all. Meanwhile, Korede is listing off all of Ayoola's best qualities, which only Korede knows, in her head. That's a very good sister!

Ned Beauman's VENOMOUS LUMPSUCKER (Narr by John Hastings)

I didn't know how much I'd been wanting Ned Beauman to write some actual speculative fiction, preferably also with reduced Nazi content) until Ned Beauman wrote some actual speculative fiction that still made me laugh, bitterly. 

Venomous Lumpsucker is even more of a departure from what I've become accustomed to in Beauman's work than the above suggests. Instead of a history-less historical fiction, it is every bit as science fictional as, say, The Mountain in the Sea or War with the Newts. Instead of romantic and sexual obsessions, we have characters seeking redemption and atonement, both for their own sakes and for humanity's. Instead of biting satire, we have envenomed biting satire.

The title fish is an imaginary species of cleaner fish (like pilot fish or wrasse),* that, yes, injects venom in its bite, but more importantly, in its cooperative behavior the lone scientist studying them compares to that of Asian gangsters, it shows signs of significant intelligence. Maybe even greater than dolphin-level. Maybe as great as ours allegedly is. Or as great as that of certain Newts or Octopuses.

It is, of course, on the edge of human-caused extinction in the near-future world of this novel. And if its would-be saviors are anything to go on, it's going to go right over that edge really, really soon. 

Karin Ressaint and her accidental partner in species preservation, Mark Halyard, both work in the Byzantine new extinction industry, a complex and insincere global system that makes the fossil fuel industry's token efforts to combat climate change look, well, no, those still look horribly feeble and hollow but, well, actually, it's hard to say which is worse. Suffice it to say that Karin's job is evaluating the intelligence levels of endangered species who will be made extinct by any proposed economic activity in order to determine how much money the proposing enterprise will have to fork over for killing off the species. Intelligent species cost more. There is a whole system of Extinction Credits involved in this that I'm not going to mess with explaining here, but that's basically it. Our future global society, in Beauman's savagely jaundiced view, will have corporations, and thus everybody else, fully accepting species extinction as just another cost of doing business, while nobody even pretends to consider not doing the things that will cause extinctions -- and also a whole gross derivatives market built on top of the credit system. In which executives with inside knowledge occasionally dabble, because of course they do. 

Such a one is Mark Halyard, who works for the gigantic sea-bottom mining company whose next project will most likely wipe out the venomous lumpsucker. But since he and his colleagues game the system better than anybody, they're even less worried about things than usual, because they're on the verge of yet another successful attempt at changing the legal definition of "extinction" into something with bigger loopholes to buzz on through; namely that even if the last actual living member of a species dies off, that species won't technically be extinct as long as its genome, tissue samples, brain wave patterns, etc, have all been preserved well enough for them to be brought back to life, Jurassic Park style, in some theoretical future when we'll somehow have magically fixed up the damage we did that killed them off in the first place. Because of course we're totally going to do that someday, guys. It'll be great. Just wait. 

At first these two characters would seem to be at odds with one another, but as the plot ramps up and horrible unforeseen happenstances just happen to happen, they find they kind of have a common goal: to minimize the damage done by poorly controlled autonomous mining equipment and Halyard's ill-timed foray into playing the Extinction Credit Market. Oh, and an apocalyptic hack, but we'll get to that.

Along the way they visit corporate-run wildlife preserves (so underfunded but under so much pressure to succeed at any cost that the manager of the one our duo visits has secretly agreed to allow toxic waste to be dumped, in leaky drums, right in the middle of the Pristine Preserve), climate refugee camps (in which a gross new zoonotic disease has emerged that does disgusting cosmetic damage to cattle and the human serfs who herd them -- refugees are cheaper even than robots for some kinds of labor) and a libertarian sea-stead community that might as well be Rapture from Bioshock right before everybody gave it up for lost -- and that's just all in the book's first half. Because they're on the trail of a mystery as well as desperately trying to find other populations of venomous lumpsuckers; they're also on the trail of who or whatever hacked and destroyed the entire system that preserved all of those DNA sequences and tissue samples and recordings of mating calls and habitat data in one swift attack right before Ressaint and Halyard met up.

And every stop shows us more and more examples of cynical depravity on both petty and grandiose scales. I especially howled at a character met in Not-Rapture, a Professional Conservationist who funds his noble and legit operations by taking samples of actually endangered species and, with the help of a Mad Scientist, tweaks the DNA just a little bit, then returns the "evidence" of a "whole new species" to the wild to be discovered by habitat monitoring robots, thus earning tradable Extinction Credits when the government "saves" the nonexistent pseudo-species.

I mean, this is still a Ned Beauman novel.

Once again, the novel has multiple endings, and none of them are exactly satisfying, but I think in this case the unsatisfying endings have a definite point: tidy endings are products of art rather than reality; in the real world, we're all just muddling through and doing what we can at least half-assedly convince others is our "best"; nobody is really in charge; there isn't a plan; problems are never solved but only kicked, can-like, down the road. Anybody who tells you differently probably just embezzled a bunch of money from their employer and wants your help in laundering the loot.

Fucking Ned Beauman.

*Of course I only added that parenthetical note because I think "wrasse" is a cool word that's fun to say or otherwise use. 

NO DUCKS GIVEN: Day Three: 2 January, 2024

the fact that we're broke because I had cancer, the fact that that broke us, it broke us, the fact that I shouldn't say that because here we are, still kicking... the fact that Phoebe helped us out and we'll never be able to pay her back...

I'm not even a hundred pages into Ducks, Newburyport but I can already see that we're going to at least touch on everything that could make a person fret circa 2018 before I'm through the thousand or so yet to come, like an Infinite Jest for grown-ups. Without any embarrassing attempts at AAVE, I'm guessing/hoping.

I went through a year of cancer treatments *at a remove* a decade or so ago, when my dad was diagnosed -- very early by a family doctor who was a little boy when my dad was in his prime, who noticed that my dad's voice had profoundly changed during that doctor's years of medical school and army service -- with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. But he was already on Medicare and so the financial hit was negligible, and the diagnosis was early enough that all he ever needed was a tonsillectomy and a few rounds of monoclonal antibodies and he was still cancer-free when he died last month of Alzheimer's and an opportunistic infection. But if it had hit him in his prime, when that family physician was still a kid and those drugs weren't around and Dad would have had to go the chemo route, it absolutely would have broken us. Our narrator caught a bullet that we dodged. But as she says, they're still kicking; whatever Leo does for a living earns enough to keep them in their house and feeding four children while she does unpaid labor at home and apparently supplements their income by selling homemade pies? Which, how much money can she actually make that way?

By the way, I'm sick of typing "unnamed narrator." Since she seems to have sisters named Abby and Phoebe, I've decided to start calling her Gabby, because her internal monologue is very gabby indeed and it matches nicely with the "bee" phoneme at the end of the others' names. And it was my very own personal nickname as a little girl who made frequent appearances in my mother's newspaper column that she wrote until my sister and I were old enough that we might have friends who could read it and mine it for things to tease us about. She gave us each code names to further shield us a bit: Gabby and Gus. Though everybody knew and none of our school mates were ever imaginative enough to seek ammunition in the newspaper.

Am I trying to hard to identify with this character?

Anyway, it's really mother and daughter relationships that loom large in the chunk I read today. Gabby, we learn, is still dealing with the somewhat recent loss of her own mother, whom she calls Mommy in her head (and yes, this makes my own eyes leak because it's only two weeks tomorrow since I lost my Daddy and yes, I still called him Daddy to his face even as I gave him his last kiss goodbye when he was just starting to turn cold), and her daughter Stacy* is a teenager so disapproving of everything that Gabby does as to make Gabby sort of low key afraid of all teenaged girls. 

We already know that Stacy is quite outraged by what she has recently learned about the history of slavery in the U.S. and successfully has applied abolitionist reasoning to argue her way -- and by extension, her siblings' way -- out of having a share in household chores. I wonder how much longer it's going to be before Gabby is being blamed for Trump (still president at the time of this novel), climate change, wage stagnation, health care costs, maybe even for getting cancer. Angry teenagers paint with very broad brushes.

Another motif that keeps coming up is famous old shipwrecks, first the Titanic and now the SS La Bourgogne of 1898, which hit another ship rather than an iceberg and which is infamous for the poor ratio of crew to passenger survival rate because "the crew kicked and stabbed the passengers so they could get on the lifeboats" and so only one woman was saved and 300 drowned. In Gabby's opinion, the Bourgogne was a worse disaster than the Titanic and I think she has persuaded me. But so, why does Gabby know so much about shipwrecks? It's that what she reads about in her vanishingly small spare time? Did she write papers about them in college? Was she in the Navy before she became a mother, full-time or otherwise? I still have so many questions.

But there are still no ducks, still no Newburyport.

*Whom I'm now more certain is Gabby's daughter from her first marriage, because Gabby recalls buying Stacy a miniature piano at a junk shop the day after Leo proposed to Gabby. And this probably just adds to Stacy's hostility, if she, for instance, resents having a stepdad? Or any of the many other things that children of divorce have feelings about? Unless maybe her bio-dad died and Gabby was a widow before marrying Leo? Like I've said, so many questions!

NO DUCKS GIVEN: Day Two: 1 January, 2024

Last night on Mastodon, where I happily landed not long after Lonny Emeralds turned Twitter into Xitter, I saw a venn diagram that could maybe serve as a back cover for Lucy Ellman's massive torrent-of-consciousness novel,  Ducks, Newburyport.

Ducks, Newburyport, of course, pre-dates COVID-19 and so neither Ellman nor her unnamed narrator knows what an "anti-masker" might be apart from someone who, say, really hates Halloween, but the toddler and mountain lion overlapping just cried out to me to be included in these early days of exploring this literary chonk. 

Our narrator, parent to four children, has certainly had experience with toddlers (and may still be having same; it sounds like at least youngest son Jake is in that age range,  though hey, I dragged a blankie around long into my elementary school years. What babyish habits might the baby of a family not have, really?), and the prologue-cat could well be a mountain lion of she doesn't indeed turn out to be the house cat with big dreams I initially imagined.

But... do we know for certain that toddlers don't also want to kill you? I mean, based on the novel so far, the kids are certainly wearing our narrator down to a nub and not giving her much help in keeping the household going. Her oldest, Stacy, who I'm now guessing is a teenager rather than grown and out of the house, seems to have won the chores/allowance dispute for all time by calling it "slavery" when kids are asked to pick up after themselves or each other, to say nothing of emptying the dishwasher, and so our narrator is trying to do it all. Not sustainable, ma'am. Your toddler alone will kill you (says I with no kids but with a chronic illness that makes me think that maybe I can relate...)!

What's kind of freaking me out so far in this book is how closely the narrator's thought processes and mine seem to match, as her mind wanders to the same homonyms and related yet-unrelated ideas and words. I like to think of myself as a unique individual, but am I, when some fictional character in a big fat novel, a suburban mother of four children (in contrast to my childless spinsterhood) also thinks of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Anne Shirley and Anne Elliott all at once while also considering why she hates words like "extrude." Which means that some novelist put those thoughts together and extruded these thoughts that I've felt were mine alone into a book a few years ago. On the one hand, this is comforting: I'm not alone, our shared culture and educational system have had similar results and given us things in common; on the other, well, of I'm not a unique and beautiful snowflake, then what's the point of me?

There's a podcast to which I'm an occasional and irregular listener, Gen X: This is Why, the idea of which is to explain the weird beliefs and tendencies and habits and hang-ups of people my age through the lens of the pop culture we consumed as kids. Its primary focus is on individual episodes of the TV adaptation of Laura Ingalls/Rose Wilder's libertarian pioneer fantasies, Little House on the Prairie. It's a charming show hosted by a pair of sisters who tease out loads of weird misapprehensions people our age may well have originally derived from that show in the 70s when it was on prime time. I think they're definitely onto something; famously we of the tiny forgotten demographic between the Baby Boomers and most of their children weren't only shaped by being barely supervised latchkey kids fending for themselves after school but by the books and TV shows that were aimed at us. So it actually makes perfect sense that this still-unnamed suburban housewife narrator has thought patterns and cultural touchstones so very like my own, even though I never actually read any Lucy Maud Montgomery.*

I'm beginning to suspect the our narrator, like author Ellman herself, is maybe a bit older than I, or was raised by stricter and more traditional parents than mine were; she refers, for instance, to Charles Ingalls as having an Amish-like beard, which generally means a beard without a mustache, a look far too goofy to have ever suited Mr. Michael Landon )who embodied the character as an absurdly handsome 70s sex symbol with a truly luscious head of hair, but was always clean-shaven, even in black and white as Little Joe, and never mind how he always had a sharp razor and soap and time to preen every day even in a long hard winter of near-starvation). Her Charles Ingalls is a purely literary Charles Ingalls, whereas mine is decidedly a televisual one. Michael Landon intruded on my imagination before Charles Ingalls ever got a chance, because the TV show was inescapable for a school-aged child before I was sophisticated enough to appreciate the books, by which time the last thing I wanted was to read about pioneer kids, who didn't feel different or exotic enough for a girl seeking escapism from 1970s Wyoming, where at least one classmate still pooped in an outhouse when he was at home (and was a Nellie Olson-caliber bully but also knew how to use his fists. Ask how I know) and another had to wear a baseball helmet until first grade because he'd been kicked in the head by a horse as a toddler.

Then, too, there is the fact that her homemaker idol is Irma S. "Joy of Cooking" Rombauer, whose tendency to put mayonnaise on or in everything and love of putting everything else in aspic it seems that our narrator is only now starting to question as a journeywoman adult where I was, if anything, taught to mock the Rombauers by a range of gloriously untidy and slapdash female authority figures who were happy to watch Julia Child on TV but treated her as a fantastic and unrealistic character as weird and exotic and weirdly powerful as, say, Ozma of Oz, whom our narrator has yet to mention as she has also skated around Nancy Drew. I think our paths are about to diverge, as indeed her obvious possession of a candy apple red KitchenAid stand mixer that she claims has paid for itself indicates. And I mean, after all, her author is a graduate of Evanston Township High School, and I know several other such types and, well, none of them have ever had to subsist on a diet of instant ramen and eggs unless they'd blown their stipends on beer for the week, if you know what I mean.

*Our tiny school library didn't have any, nor did our even tinier public library, and by the time the TV show with Megan Follows turned up, I was only interested in science fiction and fantasy and heartily sick of Nancy Drew, which our library had the complete series of and was my rock bottom choice to read that I nonetheless had to read a lot because there wasn't much else. It was the 1970s in Wyoming.