(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Life is supposed to be something wonderful, alive, free, giddily good and delightfully joyous right?
Add it to anything and it immediately adds buoyancy and zest to proceedings, a sunshiney vibrancy that stands as a direct counterpoint to death, pain, loss and fossilisation of personality and intent, and which acts as a restorative antidote to all the things around that try to suck the lifeforce from us.
But that’s the ideal of life and being alive, and it leaves out the fact that a great many people suffer trauma so profound, including this reviewer, that you emerge out into the harsh blinking surroundings of adulthood afraid of the very thing that’s supposed to uplift and enliven you.
Someone affected by this troubled start to being a grown-up is Phoebe Walsh, the protagonist of Alicia Thompson’s Love in the Time of Serial Killers, who suffered through an semi-abusive relationship with her father and an indifferent one with her mother and a scarring incident as a teenager and found herself afraid of connection, intimacy and interaction with people generally.
She’s arrived back in her hometown of Florida to ready her recently deceased father’s home for sale, with the help of her annoyingly sweet and upbeat younger brother Conner and his girlfriend Shani, and to finish her PhD dissertation on the true crime, a genre which is generally seen as pulpy and inconsequential but which she believes shines a light on humanity and our capacity for evil.
It was wild, how off my initial perception of him has been. The truth was that this Sam scared me more. He seemed like he was from a different planet, one where dancing was fun and families were big and happy. And I was from some other distant, lonely star, my lungs incapable of breathing his planet’s atmosphere.
What she does intend to do is get to know her handsome neighbour who she suspects for a whole host of purely circumstantial reasons might in fact be a serial killer.
After all, when she arrives at her dad’s place at 2 a.m. Sam appears and offers to help to take her heavy desk off the car, an offer she rebuffs because what the hell dude? It’s 2 freaking a.m.!
She then spies him with what might be blood on his hands and on and on, convinced that the elementary school music teacher who’s kind, thoughtful and sweet might in fact hide a far darker secret behind the squeaky clean suburban exterior.
Turns out though that Sam may be the very thing Phoebe fears most – a decent guy with his heart firmly in the right place who could give Phoebe the very thing she thinks she can’t handle which is real meaningful connection with another human being.
While she’s dodging back and forth to avoid feeling anything for Sam who, dammit, is every bit as nice as he appears – but is he doing terrible things under the cover of night? Phoebe is happy to keep that as a possibility if it keeps at an emotional arm’s length – she ‘s trying to figure out how to restart her friendship with Alison, her bestie from high school she hasn’t seen in years who was the cause of a quite painful moment in her trauma-laced teenage years.
(courtesy official author site)
What makes Love in the Time of Serial Killers such a pleasure to read is that it’s both a ton of fun – the witty, bouncy dialogue alone is worth the price of admission; you will wish you were party to some of these conversations! – but also dives deep into what it is that shapes us into someone capable of connecting from the world or running hellbent from it shouting “Unclean! Unclean!”
To be fair, Phoebe doesn’t literally do that but she’s not far off it, and as she tries to reconcile while Sam both delights and terrifies her she begins to realise that something is quite wrong deep inside of her and that maybe not all people are obsessed with true crime as she is and that while it’s a legitimate interest, and one that might nab her a great job at a local college, perhaps a little more balance is needed.
Quite how to get that balance is another thing entirely and while Phoebe can see many good and wonderful things flowing from getting to know Sam better and surrendering to her emergent feelings for him, she’s not entirely sure she wants the way things currently are.
She knows the way she reacts to life isn’t healthy but so entrenched can long-established protective reactions to trauma be – and there’s a very real chance her intense love of true crime is precisely a mechanism to wall her off from further hurt – that dismantling them can seem overwhelming to the point of terrified inaction.
I wanted Conner and Shani there, if it was at all possible this late in the game. I wanted Conner to give me a high five afterward and say something ridiculous about the one twisted detail he’d gleaned from my entire presentation. I wanted Shani to be there, radiating positivity and encouragement. I knew it was very unlikely that Alison would be able to come, but I would love for her to.
Most of all, I wanted Sam.
Love in the Time of Serial Killers may seem like a frothy clever title, and honestly it’s one of the best titles to grace this blog all year, but it belies a novel that actually dares to go to some very dark personal places and ask some fairly serious questions.
It is also a rom-com with some real emotional heft and grunt, which means that while there is an idiosyncratic meet-cute, flirting and tentative connection and near romantic misses – all the things in fact that make this genre such a delight to indulge in – there’s also one woman’s story of what happens when a crossroads is reached and you have to work out, at the ripe old age of thirty whether you want to sustain business as usual or are ready to start a reinvention that while scary, might lead to some very good life choices indeed.
Choice that aren’t influenced by what you’re afraid of in life, and goodness knows Phoebe has a metric ton of those lurks in a psyche fit to bursting with a thousand reasons why living life connected to others is best avoided at all costs, but by the lovely things that might come your way if you can summon the bravery from somewhere to stare down your trauma and live life as it’s a good things and not a threat.
That isn’t easy and Thompson, who writes as deftly with humour as she does affectingly incisive emotional insight, doesn’t pretend otherwise, gifting us some wonderfully promising moments of what might happen if, but also giving Phoebe the time she needs to come to grips with life as a loved-up adventure and not some sort of terrifying survival course.
She succeeds beautifully in giving the protagonist of Love in the Time of Serial Killers depth, real emotions and understandable, if wittily expressed, trauma and then moving her on, bit by bit and moment by moment until all she has to do, and again NOT EASY, is step forward and accept that being driven by hope, love and connection is a damn sight better than stultifying fear any day.