The Shining Girls

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

You might go into this book thinking that it is a science fiction time-travel story. The heart of the story is a serial killer who manages to kill different women across six decades. The killer — Harper Curtis — does not do this the normal way of living through time. Instead, visits the victims — all women who “shine” to him — when they are little and then again when they are in their twenties. While the girls grow up. Harper doesn't age.

How does he do it?

It is not much of a spoiler to share that he has a magical house that lets him open the door to any day that he desires during the period 1929 to 1993.

Wait....what?

What kind of technology does that? It is not technology. The story is not interested in the mechanics of time travel. It and the reader simply assume that this is the way things are. Generally, the reader has enough goodwill to suspend disbelief and make the assumption for the sake of the story. This is part of the bargain between reader and writer — the writer will tell an interesting story if the reader concedes certain points about the way the world works. In fantasy, the concession is that magic works or elves live among us. We know this can't be true, but if we don't allow those assumptions, we don't have fantasy stories.

Science fiction works the same way. A science fiction writer will hand wave at some scientific principle or device, but effectively it is a gesture to a kind of magic. Again, the author can invoke “wormholes” as the basis for time travel, and the reader just has to agree that time travel is scientifically possible and that this device can do it.

Then, there is horror. Horror seems to exist as a separate genre, perhaps shading into fantasy on the “grimdark fantasy” frontier. Horror generally eschews systems of magic, leaving that to fantasy. Humans seem to lack agenda; they are the victims and if they prevail it is because the villain is hit by a car or a nuclear bomb goes off, to allude to the way Stephen King concluded “Fire Starter” and “The Stand.” Fantasy is definitely about human agency struggling and ultimately making a difference. Horror often is about human agency being meaningless. Ancient dark gods exist outside of our time and space who will wipe us out as easily as we swat a fly when the stars are right over R'ylleh.

I've always thought that horror is a genre for the lazy. Horror is about evil. Even if God is not a necessary hypothesis, horror must assume that evil exists and that it can work weird miracles, whatever weird miracles are needed by the author. No explanation is necessary or even attempted. If the author needs a weird, time-traveling house to allow a sociopath to kill women over the twentieth century, then — hey, presto! — the house appears because.....the devil? Ancient alien gods? Fate? Who knows? Evil has its reasons for existence.

“The Shining Girls” is horror. Harper is one of the many destitute men out on the streets during the Great Depression. We know from the start that he is not a good man. When he stumbles into the house after committing a murder, he finds the body of the previous occupant, who has been killed. Harper discovers that the previous occupant used the house's time-travel potential for sensible purposes, namely, making sports bets on contests he knows the outcomes for. In contrast, Harper immediately intuits that there is a list of girls in one room that he must kill. Why? Because Harper is evil and evil explains itself. Horror is simple if lazy.

Kirby Mazrachi is one of the girls numbered among Harper's “shining girls.” Harper botches the job on her and she survives in a way that leaves him thinking he was successful. Kirby's mission is to find her attacker. She interns with Dan Velazquez, the crime reporter who covered her story. She uses Dan's connections at his newspaper to find clues that suggest that there have been murders over the decades where odd objects have been left with the body. One or two of these objects are paradoxically anachronistic. Dan becomes infatuated with Kirby.

In science fiction, Kirby and Dan would have reasoned their way to an answer from the paradoxical clues. In fantasy, Kirby and Dan would have employed courage and inspiration to overcome the adversary. This is horror and so all of the breadcrumb clues don't matter. In the end, Harper learns that Kirby lived and comes to get her before she and Dan have verified that the clues are true. Human agency is ultimately irrelevant.

This may be particularly true in time-travel fiction. This book occasionally gestures at the idea that everything is predetermined. When Harper disposes of the body of the previous owner, he saw the body of another person in a dumpster in 1993. When Harper meets that man later, Harper closes the loop by killing the man in 1931 and dumping him into the dumpster in 1993 before he puts the other body in. The shining girls are on the list because Harper killed them and he killed them because they were on the list. Human agency is so lacking that effect precedes cause.

The story proceeds as a thriller. Dan's unrequited romantic feelings for Kirby remain unrequited. Like the paradoxical clues, the romantic tension was filler.

This book has been turned into a series for Apple TV. I'm sure that it will make a fine bit of entertainment. The story itself is entertaining. The problem is that for me the author broke the deal which was to keep me so entertained that I would not start picking nits in the time-travel house McGuffin. At the end, I wasn't that interested in the characters who were thin personalities revolving around their fixations. Dan came across as potentially the most interesting, but his infatuation with Kirby required its own suspension of disbelief given their two-decade age difference.

The time-travel element was also thin. The author made an effort to research details about the Chicago setting and history. The first “shining girl” murder — the murder of an erotic dancer who painted herself with radium so that she would glow during performances — is a historic fact. There was also a nice scene where Harper takes a woman from 1931 to the Chicago World's Fair of 1937. These kinds of scenes will be visually arresting in the TV series, assuming that viewers know the timing of these events.

These are details. The fact that I'm spending time on these details indicates that the book did not make me want to keep my disbelief suspended. But I was judging it as a science fiction book where the logic is tighter, and humans have agency. As a horror book, this book has entertainment value.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes.