Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California has made me think (again but also in new ways) about how we deliberately and accidentally splinter our consciousness in the face of the unbearable. I wrote about the book for Alta’s California Book Club: I am wild about the books they choose and the smart, great essays people post and the wonderful live Zoom conversations. Also, I count myself very lucky to keep learning from Anita Felicelli, brilliant writer and brilliant, respectful editor. Here’s the beginning of my piece about the book:

In Venita Blackburn’s original, fierce first novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, Coral E. Brown, a graphic sci-fi novelist, finds her brother dead by suicide and splinters into separate selves. As she fends off grief and horror, the futuristic machines she’s invented to narrate her own novel step in to tell the story with tender, wry curiosity about humanity. As these machines say from the start, “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” Of course, since the machines are her creation, she is telling the story, but obliquely, as a novelist does. They investigate her deep past and family and report on her thoughts and actions after her brother’s death. They draw conclusions about human relationships to destructiveness, debt, desire, minor fame, avoidance, denial, fan fic, and the devastating, insatiable human craving for “More.”