BRUTES, by Dizz Tate
ON THE SAVAGE SIDE, by Tiffany McDaniel
A preacher’s daughter disappears in the swamplands of Florida. An empty bedroom, a ripped window screen, a small town in panic. A chorus of echoes asking: Where is Sammy?
And so opens “Brutes,” the elegant debut novel by Dizz Tate. Billed as a descendant of Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 book, “The Virgin Suicides,” Tate’s work takes a sanctioned vision of suburbia and transforms it.
Like Eugenides’s book, “Brutes” employs the collective perspective. The narrator is a group of adolescent girls, united in their hive-mind, telling us the story of Sammy’s disappearance from a place of shared consciousness. “We watch like we have always watched,” they tell us. This rhapsodic voice is made up of six bored 13-year-olds, lumped into one brain, intent on causing mischief: Hazel, Britney, Leila, Isabel, Jody and Christian (a boy they consider a part of the group without question or concern, a fresh glimmer of authorial originality). This narrator speaks with a natural sense of shared identity. Together they make a raucous whole, curious and unsupervised, embodying both child and monster.
The conceit of the novel echoes a familiar voyeurism: What happens when a pretty girl goes missing? How do we glorify her or misunderstand her? Tate uses these timeworn questions as a springboard for a larger examination of trauma and memory. But right when I thought I could predict this novel’s arc, it surprised me.
Just as the novelty of a collective psyche begins to wither, the voice breaks apart. The girls begin to individuate. The first chapter outside the communal mindshare belongs to Hazel, and is set a decade in the future. The shift is a breath of air, a creative leap with manifold payoffs, heightening the book’s ambition. The things we think we understand as children become completely different, supplanted with the knowledge of adulthood. Each girl (and Christian) will receive her own adult chapter, jolting us out of their groupthink and into a more realized space — the insight of adulthood changes the experiences they could not fully comprehend when they were young. The adult narratives follow no set arc, instead functioning like subtle, sparkling short stories, layering the group’s teenage years with a clarity only time can provide.
As the story moves on, it loses track of Sammy, and the mystery is waylaid in favor of something more arresting, more sinister, more enthralling. By the end, “Brutes” feels wonderfully untethered, wild and unpredictable. The novel is an exploration of adolescent trauma and its otherworldly manifestations rather than a retelling of a trope. It does indeed recall Eugenides’s young character Cecilia, who faces a male physician after the novel’s opening suicide attempt. “Obviously, Doctor,” she tells him, “you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.”
Tiffany McDaniel’s third novel, “On the Savage Side,” does not deal in subtlety.
Based on the true story of the Chillicothe Six, an unsolved case of six murdered women in rural Ohio, the novel follows Arcade Doggs, the daughter of addicts living in extreme poverty with her twin sister, Daffodil. The book leaps turbulently through time, from Arc and Daffy’s early childhood, where they must make magic out of ruin using only imagination, through to adulthood, where both are addicted to the drugs that killed their father and debilitated their mother. As the girls fall into sex work, their closest friends begin to turn up dead in the river.
While the novel searches idly for the identity of the man who picks off Arc’s friends one by one, it seems much more interested in exploring thematic dichotomies: pain and beauty, desire and self-destruction, sisterhood and individuality. The women of this book are clever and witchy, speaking in a poetic cadence they have created together, elegiac in some moments and overwrought in others. The men are utterly psychopathic. I have a strong stomach for violence in fiction, but McDaniel is exceptionally inventive. Some of the scenes depicting violence against women and animals are so diabolical, so visceral in their torturous brutality, I fear I will never forget them. But isn’t this part of the point? Don’t we read about murder to be shocked, scandalized? Isn’t it true that for many women in places like Chillicothe, such carnal misery is an inescapable reality? Still, the details are nauseating.
The novel uses creative structural tactics that break up Arc’s narration. A certain character is always preceded by an illustration of a spider, creeping through the novel’s margins. The river where the bodies are found is given its own brief chapters, becoming a recurring character that explores the lives of the murdered women through vignettes. And police reports are twisted into ballads. “Body temp: Unraveled,” “Age: A woman times the river divided by the edge equal to the smoke from the paper mill above her head,” “Probable cause of death: Being tethered to the hunters.” McDaniel’s sentences are often striking, ethereal and transcendent.
When I finished reading “On the Savage Side,” I felt palpable relief. After 454 pages of searing pain, inflicted on our characters by their families and strangers and themselves, I felt distinctly depleted — but alongside that exhaustion came an undeniable sense of wonder. McDaniel pulls off an impressive twist at the finale, with a plot shift that might inspire you to start the book again if your nervous system can handle it. And of course, the killer is not the point. We read for the women, the dismal yet beatific textures of their lives. Stories about murdered women always fall on the savage side, but beneath that, too, is the pulse of something beautiful.
Danya Kukafka is the best-selling author of the novels “Notes on an Execution” and “Girl in Snow.”
BRUTES | By Dizz Tate | 291 pp. | Catapult | $27
ON THE SAVAGE SIDE | By Tiffany McDaniel | 454 pp. | Knopf | $29
