The Shining Girls in Niners (io9)

Sep 06, 2013 Benjamin added it

Shelves: bedside-reading

Here's the pitch: A time traveling serial killer in Chicago is hunted by the one woman who survived his attack. Pretty fun pitch, right?

Besides knowing that teaser, I came to this book already having heard a long interview with Lauren Beukes, where she laid out several interesting ideas that framed my reading:

a) The book started as a tossed off idea on twitter about a serial killer with time travel;
b) It grew as a sort of answer to our interest in serial killers as interesting, dynamic men, ra Here's the pitch: A time traveling serial killer in Chicago is hunted by the one woman who survived his attack. Pretty fun pitch, right?

Besides knowing that teaser, I came to this book already having heard a long interview with Lauren Beukes, where she laid out several interesting ideas that framed my reading:

a) The book started as a tossed off idea on twitter about a serial killer with time travel;
b) It grew as a sort of answer to our interest in serial killers as interesting, dynamic men, rather than as pathetic, sexually dysfunctional outcasts (and/or extreme instances of our cultural lean towards misogyny);
c) The television rights were already sold.

I devoured this book very quickly, thanks to an August full of travel; but I'm only now writing a review of it after a planned book-discussion with John Coyne. (Yay for long-distance book clubs.) So some of my thoughts here may be influenced by his take.

Actually, perhaps my favorite line on The Shining Girls comes from a Strange Horizons review: "The Shining Girls often reads like the shooting script of its own adaptation—sharp, terse, summative—and while this lends it an enviable economy and addictive impetus, it also lends even its tenderer, quieter scenes an air of the artificial." (http://www.strangehorizons.com/review...)

There's a positive there that I don't want to miss: the book is sharp and has an economy of movement. (Which is another reason I read it so quickly.) But there's a certain flimsiness to the characters that made it hard to really connect with or even really care about anyone. Sure, Kirby can be snarky when she's hunting down the man who nearly killed her, but that's not enough to make me interested in a character--or even sure that there's a character there (instead of just a collection of traits: woman, non-religious Jew, snarky, stabbed). When reading it, I could see how this would have the good bones of a tv show, but it would take some work to get at the characters' depths.

This is doubly true for those interspersed chapters where we get the POV of some woman who is about to be killed by Harper, the time-traveling femicidal maniac. As much as LB notes that she wanted this book to be a celebration of the women who have been given a raw deal, the recovery of their stories never really gives us more than "here's an interesting woman--whoops, she's dead." There's a certain checklist-y quality, which I both appreciate and can't take seriously: here we have the white career woman, here the black war widow, here the transsexual, etc. This is a hard needle to thread, so I don't entirely blame Beukes: she wants to include the marginal figures; which is good, but the rote inclusion/exclusion required by a serial killer story sort of makes props out of them. As John Coyne noted, whatever the intentions were about working against the casual misogyny of serial killer thrillers, this book still offers up a series of deaths for Harper/us.

Which gets towards what really dissatisfied me about this book, which is Harper and his time-traveling house. Time-traveling stories tend towards recursions, paradoxes avoided or embraced, and a whole host of aha moments. The Shining Girls is no exception and very cleverly plays with that sort of time-loop and recursion. I appreciate that. What felt like a cop-out to me, however, was the revelation at the end that Harper is somehow possessing his time-traveling house. Sure, that turns the story into a tightly-tied recursion that fits time travel stories--Harper travels to kill the girls that Harper-the-house takes him to in order to kill them. But it really doesn't say anything interesting about the pathology and misogyny of Harper and the larger culture. And here's my comparison with the not-so-great Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: at the very least, Seth Grahame-Smith uses vampirism as a metaphor for slavery--exploitation of the other, economy of blood, empire of cruelty. Here, I feel like Beukes is gesturing towards something about misogyny towards women throughout time (well, throughout the 20th century), but the themes of the story never really connect to the tropes. At the end of the day, I can imagine the brainstorming and pitch meetings often ending with the dead-end (both conversation stopper and developmental chokehold) of "But it's cool!"

Ultimately, I think this book may be perfect for TV, which might increase connections with the characters while keeping the popcorn enjoyments of the plot twists. Still, I can't help but wonder what an Ursula K. Le Guin or James Tiptree, Jr. would have done with such a fun premise. ...more

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Jun 12, 2013 Bridget rated it really liked it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jun 18, 2013 Mary rated it really liked it

Excellent thriller about a serial killer who uses time travel to find and then follow "shining" young girls over decades of time, finally gruesomely killing them and then escaping detection through the use of the time travel. Things start to unravel though when one of the shining girls manages to survive her savage attack. It is sometimes hard to read and keep straight in your mind a story with time travel and it must be even harder to write it. Beukes does a good job of it though, keeping the n ...more

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Jun 28, 2013 Vanessa rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction

Starts off very strong but degenerates, to my mind, a little over half-way through. It begins to read a bit Dan Brown-ish (ultra short chapters) and was a bit too descriptive in its violence for my taste. Ms. Beukes leaves a lot of interesting bits of her story by the wayside (Why do these girls shine? How does this House work? Why Harper and not anyone else?) in favor of the slashiness, which is just not my cup of tea.

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May 12, 2013 Kaila rated it it was ok

Shelves: science-fiction, missed-the-mark, io9-book-club, 2013, gritty-dark-blood, time-travel

This book had a great premise, but the tag line is more exciting than anything that actually happens in the book. It was kind of boring, and while I'm fine without pages and pages of exposition, a LITTLE explanation wouldn't have gone astray.

Mostly just a police procedural, and there's a reason I don't read mystery. I like my sci fi. But the fantastical element in this story really didn't do or matter much. The whole book, while well written and a page turner, left me feeling unfulfilled. ...more

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