tl;dr

As I’ve come to expect from Thompson, a tight unsettling novella with an understatement for a title.

opening remarks

Tade Thompson is a fantastic writer and if you haven’t already you should read his two previous novels Making Wolf and Rosewater.  I always intended to read The Murders of Molly Southbourne, his first Tor novella, on the day of publication but all great plans etc…

knee-jerk observations

This isn’t the opening of the novella; there’s an intriguing first-person bookend (I assume) that sees Molly Southbourne sit down with a shackled up person and tell them her story.  This is the beginning of that story.  It immediately reminds me how intense and confronting Thompson’s prose can be.

I now know how to dismember a pig, which as a Jew will come in handy (yes, I know there are Jews who eat pig, I’m not one of them).

I agree with Molly, massages are overrated (although I don’t condone retaliation):

Being chased after by carbon copies of yourself is most definitely creepy.  Having your parents slaughter the duplicates, chop them up and burn the remains is fucked up.  All of this from the perspective of a 9-year-old girl.  I gotta say, I’m loving it.

Thompson’s set pieces as Molly becomes accustomed to her unique gift are both violent, funny and macabre.  The rebellious teen Molly hunts her copies while the older Molly, transitioning from a teenager to an adult, is more circumspect until the day she gets the flu, things go awry, and she ends up lying on a pile of Molly corpses.  The ‘murders’ of Molly Southbourne is an understatement.

Oh, I see what you did there Mr Thompson – Skull and Bones anyone?

The Gist Of It

The Murders of Molly Southbourne is a tightly written, nasty (in all the good ways) unsettling novella.

As I’ve come to expect Thompson’s prose is bold and visual, he doesn’t waste words, but he also doesn’t mind pushing the graphic content up a few notches when it’s appropriate to the scene.  The gorier moments often involve Molly bludgeoning to death her duplicates which makes it all the more disturbing.  As for Molly, Thompson does a terrific job in portraying her as socially awkward but also forthright and competent. Personally, I’d be a gibbering mess if I knew one drop of my blood could create a homicidal facsimile of me, but Molly – after some adjustment as a child – takes it in her stride.

While the ending is a tad predictable, this is still a very satisfying novella that would make one hell of a feature film.