Rating:

“All humans would eventually try anything to feel more than nothing.”

Author: Venita Blackburn

I came to Dead in Long Beach, California accidentally, through an Audible sampling that ran automatically after my previous book finished. The sample was only a few minutes, but I was hooked by the dark lyricism and the idea.

In Dead in Long Beach, California Coral arrives with groceries at her brother’s apartment to find him dead, the result of suicide. She pockets his cellphone and then, as she devolves into complicated grief, starts answering his messages as though she were him. She talks to his girlfriend. His daughter. His friends. She lives through his lens, all the while catapulting back to her own long buried memories, her complicated relationship with her sibling and family, and her weird dystopian sci-fi fan-fictiony book.

The story, which is like a modern-day Virginia Woolfe, only more obtuse, is stream-of-consciousness with a sardonic, sad little twist. A lot of sentences begin with things like “in the ministry for hiding from your ex so you don’t have to face your own loss,” or something like that. At first, this is kind of interesting. I loved it. Then it got done again. And again. And again. And again. ENOUGH!

“In the clinic for Telling lies to Avoid Pending Death, we say we’ve been here before. We say that each new loss, each new goodbye, teaches us how to handle the next one and the one after that. We say many things that are not really true. We do not say that each death is different, each goodbye will rip in new and unforeseeable ways, and the pain is never exactly the same.”

The weird fugue state gets in the actual way of the narrative. Yes, we get it. Coral is going through the stages of grief, namely denial and some anger, and she is lost. Does the narrative also have to be lost? It’s so difficult to tell what is happening in the real world (although this takes place within a day), when the narrative switches to Coral’s own sci-fi book (which has nothing to do with anything), when the flashbacks begin and end, and why they matter. Some moments are poignant, and there are a few cool sentences here and there, but mostly it’s a story set in the clinic of trying way too hard to be smart and edgy, when you really should just tell the damn story already. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Image by Yori Designs from Pixabay

Here are some of the questions that never get answered: WHY does Coral pretend to be her dead brother – and to his own child too? Why does she not think about this, and where does she think this will go? What happens when someone else – um, his girlfriend his daughter – comes to his apartment, opening it with their keys to find his dead body? Granted grief IS weird . . . but it’s not THIS weird.

What the hell does Coral’s novel have to do with anything? What does she do about her brother? Is his dead body just sitting in the apartment all this time, decomposing? What about, you know, burying him?

Why did her brother commit suicide? Isn’t that kind of pertinent to the story? And what the hell is the random naked-in-a-car with another woman ending have to do with any of it?

What started out as a great concept with the potential to be both moving and immersive quickly became just another unnecessarily academic, overly stylized, and pretentious read without any soul. Not recommended.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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