manslaughter

lives are at stake. oh, and while we're on the subject of lives, vote for women's.

Nov 05, 2024

I originally envisioned this to be more along the lines of Bad Men from the anti-heroine shelf, with books that followed a female vigilante with a warped sense of justice who is out to get revenge against abusive men1. Alas as you’ll see below, though I had many titles in that very specific genre to work with, I didn’t enjoy any of them enough to recommend them to you all. I didn’t even make it past the first couple of chapters of some of them, because they often seemed more enamored with their premise than their story or their characters. A few I finished and then wished I hadn’t because I have too many books waiting for me2 to waste time on a bad read.

Oh well. Because of that annoying development, I changed the focus of today’s shelf to have a wider homicidal lens. All of these protagonists are killers though they each possess different skill levels, motivations and techniques. While these characters are typically a story’s antagonist, I found it a cheeky sort of thrill to follow the perspectives of these ‘villains3’. Today we’ll enter a secret school of murder, cross paths with a psychopathic serial killer and search for blood with a vampire.

Get your knives out, confirm your alibi and cover your tracks as you could lose your moral compass inside one of these.

MURDER YOUR EMPLOYER by Rupert Holmes

The McMasters Conservatory for the Applied Arts is an extremely specialized school where select students are brought to its top secret campus and given a wholistic education on how to murder4 effectively and get away with it. A sort of overview and case study of the school, this uses journal entries, interviews, faculty appraisals and some extrapolations as it follows three of its ‘deletists’ during their studies and ‘thesis’ projects in the 1950s. A failing grade will not be survived.

"Let us bow our heads in a moment of reflection."

"Heavenly father, who gave life to all creatures on this earth and then thought it would be just as good an idea to give us death ...thank you for the bounty we are about to receive, and also for the bounty which is not on our heads. Give us this day our daily bread and may I just say how delicious the brioche was today, my compliments to our baker as well as to our maker-and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who've trespassed against us once we've deleted them. And may all of us soon be saying 'Amen' at the funeral of our targets. Amen."

Full of tongue-in-cheek wordplay, this is darkly comedic in its blithe disregard for the sanctity of (some) human life and I very much enjoyed its conceit. The bulk of the tale takes place on school grounds which is set up as a sort of idyllic English village5 filled with quaint markets, adorable cottages, imposing gothic chapels and shadowy, secret lairs. Our main protagonist is scholarship student Cliff Iverson, an aviation engineer whose boss is almost mustache-twirling in his vileness, while the side characters are Gemma and Doria, two women with their own personal qualms with leadership. I enjoyed the clever yet nonsensical humor of the narrator, the little insights into the student body and the setup of the school itself where one can take a class like Poisons and Panaceas, Great Last Meals, Odds and Getting Even, PreMed(itaded) and the required course, Alibis6.

While the story and voice is singularly humorous, the characters did feel a bit flat and simplistic. One of the POVs didn’t really add much to the story and slowed down the pacing so I could have done without it. This could also get overly detailed and repetitive at times, like the author didn’t trust the reader to connect the dots which diluted some of the suspense and tension. I would have liked a bit more twists and surprises, but I suppose the formatting and presentation didn’t really allow for too much of that. I did enjoy the charming pencil illustrations throughout. Overall a fun, playful, dark comedy with a unique concept and voice that was oddly cathartic at times.

Let me close by stating with fervor (we do not like to use the word conviction) that along with the many practical lessons to be learned at McMasters, there are rich philosophical insights to be gleaned as well, whether you spend your time with us on the conservatory grounds or here in this volume. During the course of your tutelage, I hope you will come to better understand and appreciate the remarkable frailty of all life... and that you will learn to live each day as if it might be your enemy's last.

YOU’D LOOK BETTER AS A GHOST by Joanna Wallace

Claire is an aspiring artist and successful serial killer who has been newly orphaned. Though her grief support group helps with distraction and processing, it hasn’t taken the place of her number one coping strategy: the methodical murdering of those who wrong her. After she’s witnessed murdering Lucas because of an email typo, she becomes entangled in a blackmail scheme that threatens to upend her meticulously crafted life and homicidal hobby. However, blackmailing a serial killer may not have been a wise choice…

This is dark and has a deeply creepy opening with an extremely unreliable and twisted narrator. Unlike some other murder protagonist books, this one does not sugarcoat the main character’s actions or provide much in the way of justifying her killing sprees because she’s pretty much a hard core psychopath. And she isn’t the only psychopath in the book. This is full of twists, turns and suspense keeping you always on your toes and, if you are like me, sometimes asking aloud “what the hell is going on!?” Morbid, heavy and sometimes quite brutal there’s still a sense of levity here because Claire’s voice is so dry, irrationally irritable and shockingly aloof. While she gets bothered by minor day-to-day affronts like we all do, she deals with them in ways that probably wouldn’t enter our darkest daydreams7.

I especially loved her deliberate misuse of idioms and cliches as she amuses herself attempting to blend in with normal society. Claire isn’t a Dexter-type with a warped but well-intentionedish moral code, she often kills people for petty reasons which is horrifying but always striking and riveting. The plot feels slow and methodical but never plodding. It is always filled with tension and is hard to look away from what Claire will do next because it could be literally anything. We get a bit of backstory and some explanations of why she is the way she is, though I felt some of those reasons were a bit too fairy tale levels of evil. While the the abundance of sociopathic, heinous individuals in this vicinity was a bit unbelievable, it did make for a thrilling, bloody yet funny novel.

She really is the most repulsive specimen of ordinariness it has ever been my misfortune to observe.

WOMAN, EATING by Claire Kohda

Lydia has always had a difficult time fitting in. Being of Japanese, Malaysian and English descent while also being part human and part vampire means that her grasp on her own identity feels ever elusive. When her father dies and she puts her vampiric mother in a home, she is finally able to live ‘life’ on her own terms. She decides to pursue her dream of creating art; getting an internship and moving into a communal artist space. But before she can reliably blend into the human populace, she must sate her hunger. While she’s spent her life salivating over all the cuisines London has to offer, the only thing she is actually able to ingest is blood. On her own for the first time she grapples with her ‘vegetarian’ lifestyle, the strength of her hunger and desire, her artistic endeavors and an ever tempting and ever evolving relationship to the humans around her.

This is short and punchy at around 200 pages. Though about a vampire, it has very universal themes of growing up, developing a sense of self outside of parental control and being a woman dealing with hunger, desire and ambition within male dominated spheres. I loved being inside’s Lydia’s first person POV as she fumbled her way into spaces where she feels like an imposter (in many ways) and I cheered as she doggedly works to realize her own wholly unique sense of self.

This is very food focused for a book where the main character cannot eat actual food. She fixates on necks, describing them like a restaurant reviewer would a particularly delectable meal and when all of her various hungers get to be too much, she self soothes by watching ‘what I eat in a day’ videos on social media. There was something so lovely and tragic about witnessing Lydia’s longing for all that she cannot have or participate in and, though her mom thinks she is from the devil, she’s a character you instantly root for.

The vampirism here is important to plot and character, but is dealt with in an understated way as her ‘monstrous’ qualities aren’t hugely overt or distracting.8 The mother/daughter relationship is complicated, messy and fairly dark as the narrative her mom spins is one of derision, punishment and disgust at their ‘demonic’ natures. Lydia has the chance to discover her own passions and talents as well as the wider world, which introduces its own set of quandaries beyond just where to order fresh pigs blood in London. The world she steps into is one we know well; an amalgamation of the beautiful, the creative, the mundane and the grotesque and I found the way she interacts with it and her voice to be consistently sharp and insightful.

I enjoyed the author’s note on Malaysian cuisine and how she was inspired to include the specific restaurant dishes that lured and tempted Lydia. I was also delighted by the cover designer’s note. I find cover art to often be integral to the reading experience; to initially frame the story, grab a reader’s attention and communicate the tone so I loved getting a peek into the reasoning behind this book’s cover. More cover designer commentary please!

Because Lydia is an artist, it felt fitting to use a painting on the cover, but it needed to be a piece that spoke to the story on multiple levels. Caravaggio's Boy with a Basket of Fruit felt just right: the sidelong glance peering back at the viewer, the lush basket filled with food that Lydia can never eat, not to mention Caravaggio's own less-than-pristine reputation, not dissimilar to our antagonist's. The final touch: a perfectly-placed crack in the canvas— or is it a bite mark?

I can sense the few people who are in the building so strongly; I can hear not their pulses but the actual sound of their blood rushing through their veins like little rivers. I can smell their brains— the odd kind of cakey sweetness combined with the iron-y tang that brains have; I can hear the rivers of blood traveling up to those brains, filling the veins around the lungs, pumping into fingers and toes. I drift, like I'm not in control of my body at all. My mind is fixated on eating.