THE SHINING GIRLS by Lauren Beukes

[William December Starr]

THE SHINING GIRLS
by Lauren Beukes
Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company (2013)
368 pages (hardcover edition)

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1533994
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316216852

--------

This was one of the entries in that "20 Time Travel Classics" list
that was discussed here a short while ago, so I gave it a try.

Short form: Reads like a minor Stephen King work, only not as good.

Longer: In 1932 Chicago a down-on-his-luck sociopathic serial killer
finds the key to a house, which psychically leads him to the house
itself, a boarded-up wreck among other boarded-up wrecks on the
outside[1,2], luxurious and well-kept on the inside. It also comes
with a free head-bashed-in dead body, but that doesn't bother our
guy. (And no, in case you're thinking it: the corpse does not have
his face.)

The house allows time-travel between 1929 and 1993 -- you just think
of when you want to be and walk out the door -- and leads/compels
him[3] to find and murder a series of girls/women who "shine," an
aura of vivacity and potential that he can literally see. I use
"girls/women" deliberately, as his practice is to first visit them in
their childhood and then come back years later -- even though it
might only be minutes in his timeline -- and kill them, always taking
one personal object from the body and leaving behind one from his
previous kill[4]. Yes, sometimes the thing he leaves behind hasn't
been created yet, but the anachronisms are pretty subtle and nobody
notices them except eventually...

...our other main character, the only one of his victims to (barely)
survive his knife attack upon her in 1989 and is now, several years
later, understandably obsessed with getting the bastard who cut her
up. She teams up with a sports reporter for the Sun-Times who used
to cover the police/crime beat until one too many serious "back off
or we'll kill you" threats (from cops) destroyed his marriage and
sobriety. Together They Fight Crime! and, to some extent, each
other.

While they're working on the case in 1992/3, we get regaled with
about half a dozen scattered chapters in which we're introduced to a
woman and get to know and empathize with her (Beukes, the author, is
pretty good at this) and then watch her get horribly murdered. To
be honest, this gets real old real fast and by the middle/end of the
book I was just skimming these.

And eventually we get Climax and Conclusion, a little bit rushed and
arbitrary in my opinion, The End. As I said at the start of this
it's a lot like something Stephen King would have written quickly,
and in fact if you were to throw in a couple of passing references
to things like Randall Flagg or Derry, Maine, it would probably fit
just fine in his extended universe. But Beukes, while good, isn't a
storyteller on King's level, which makes the book, at nearly 370
pages, not _quite_ worth the read for me. Edit it a bit ruthlessly
down to around 200-240 pages and you'd have something though.

-----------
*1: Up to an including that being what you see if you look in a
window. Only by physically entering the structure do you
get to the real interior, where/whenever that may be.

*2: This is presented as being the house's camouflage which,
plus a sort of "Eww, I don't want to go in there" field
around it, allows it to remain not just unoccupied but in
fact unentered (with only one exception that we know of) for
decades. I'm a bit dubious about that, no matter how
permanent the area's run-down / bad neighborhood / nobody
cares status may be.

*3: I say "leads/compels" because even though the house is
driving him to commit _these_ murders, in no way whatsoever
he was a good or innocent man at the start of things. The
only difference was that before he found the house he had
only killed people for his own convenience; afterwards he
had _direction_. (Though he also kept killing for
convenience too.)

*4: "But wait, how did he _start_ this practice since he
obviously couldn't leave something from his zeroeth kill on
his first victim's body?" I hear you ask. Answer: When he
finds the house there's a room in it that already has all
the souvenirs. This is paradoxical of course, which doesn't
concern him one whit because see 'sociopath,' above.
Anything that doesn't either benefit or threaten him barely
registers in his worldview. Though he is entranced by a
drive-through car wash in 1988.

-- wds

[Steve Coltrin]

begin fnord

wds...@panix.com (William December Starr) writes:

> While they're working on the case in 1992/3, we get regaled with
> about half a dozen scattered chapters in which we're introduced to a
> woman and get to know and empathize with her (Beukes, the author, is
> pretty good at this) and then watch her get horribly murdered.

I'm putting this book on my to-be-read list just so I can take it off.

--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org Google Groups killfiled here
"A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for Deuel
to be driven to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed."
- Associated Press