When you give a sociopath the ability to time travel, nobody wins. But that’s what novelist Lauren Beukes does in The Shining Girls, the atmospheric, mind-bending, creepy tale of a time-traveling serial killer and his extraordinary victims, woven through the history of 20th-century Chicago. In the 1930s, Harper Curtis finds a key to a house on the west side. When he walks out its front door, he’s transported to whatever part of the future he’s thinking of. While he’s there he finds a girl—a “shining girl”—and he kills her. In the futures he visits, the house is always abandoned and run-down from outside—yet when he walks back in, it’s always November 1931. Beukes calls it an “atemporal space”; one of her characters describes it as a “shitty wreck from the outside, decked-out crib on the inside.”
The bleak truth at the heart of The Shining Girls is that what makes the girls exceptional also makes them victims—that they shine so brightly is what catches Harper’s eye. The opposite, hopeful truth is that no matter how many he finds, there are always more, and that one of them, Kirby, may have the power to stop him.
By Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books) In the panel “Fierce Women,” with Marcia Clark and Julia Keller, at the Printers Row Lit Fest, Sun 6/9, 11 AM Wyndham Blake Hotel, 500 S. Dearbornchicagotribune.com
free but tickets required.
