The Shining Girls

The only reason I'm giving this book two stars is because I actually managed to finish it. And believe me, that was quite an accomplishment.

When I first read a review of the book, I was intrigued by the concept - a time-traveling serial killer. With that description, I was expecting a mystery of some sort. What I got was a creepy, depressing, hot mess of a story.

Part of this was my problem -- I personally don't enjoy reading or watching graphic violence. Since the main character is a serial killer - and not a serial killer with a heart (like Dexter) - there is loads of graphic violence.

Part of my dislike was the book's execution. I understood that the serial killer liked to murder bright young women with promising futures. What I didn't understand was why. The entire premise is just a socially awkward man who really likes to kill people in disgusting ways.

Even the book's "heroine" -- the one woman who escaped -- was one-dimensional. I wasn't interested in her story. I wasn't rooting for her. Instead, I spent the book rooting for me to read it faster so I could just be finished with it.

Lauren Beukes first came to my attention thanks to William Gibson or maybe Cory Doctorow. Some great author who recommended her on Twitter. I picked up her first two books, Moxyland and Zoo City, and read Moxyland a few years ago. I liked it, but it definitely felt like Gibson’s sensibility filtered through a South African setting. On the other hand, The Shining Girls, her third novel and first for Mulholland Books, reads like Beukes striking out on her own and making a name for herself. The result is stunning, harrowing and immensely readable.

The Shining Girls follows the interlocking lives of two characters: Curtis Harper, who discovers a mysterious house that lets him travel in time as long as he murders the “shining girls” mapped out on the bedroom wall, and Kirby Mazrachi, one of Harper’s attempted murder victims who manages to survive and devotes her life to tracking him down. We are also treated to heartbreaking vignettes of the women Harper kills throughout the 20th century; every woman he murders is full of endless potential that he snuffs out by torturing them to death and mutilating their bodies.

Although time travel is part of the narrative, The Shining Girls feels more like a crime thriller than a scifi story. It helps that the story all takes part in the past – Kirby’s “present day” is the early nineties. The speculative elements exist mostly as plot devices and a way to build tension, and Beukes doesn’t spend much time explaining how Harper is able to do what he does. Beukes has a background in journalism, and it’s clear that a lot of research went into this novel. The women we meet throughout the story span multiple social classes, decades and races, and each one is carefully drawn in the short moments before she dies terribly.

My only criticism of the novel is that it feels like Kirby discovers the truth very late in the story, and after that point everything kicks into high gear until the ending. I would have liked to see a bit more of Kirby exploring the strange world of the house and its dangerous inhabitant. If nothing else, Beukes left me wanting more at the end, which is definitely a positive thing. My hope is that The Shining Girls is just the first of Beukes’ forays into crime/thriller writing. It’s a genre that suits her well.

There was just so much more that could have been done with this. It’s a shame really, because the premise/concept was really cool.

What a great mixture of horror, sci-fi, noir, and even a little bildungsroman. A lot of reviews criticized this book for not explaining why the House exists or why certain girls "shine" for Harper. This puzzles me because the shine just seems to be how a serial killer picks his victims, and the nature of the House (not why it exists exactly) is wrapped up in the end. The structure of the novel is challenging because it deals with time travel, but I loved how the book looped back in on itself. Beukes doesn't tell the story in a straightforward chronology because it can't happen that way. There are loops and circles and events that have to happen in a certain order out of time.

At the same time, she paints a realistic portrait of a serial killer in Harper's linear progression. He goes from careful planning to greater recklessness, greater need that makes him slip up, and finally falls into a disorganized, desperate mess. Kirby, meanwhile, finds the out-of-time clues and follows them despite her fear, because she can never rest until she finds Harper. All in all I really enjoyed this horror/mystery and didn't feel it needed more explanation.

Got its hooks on me and kept me reading!