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Murder, Forgotten - Deb Richardson-Moore
This mystery/thriller has an excellent premise - an elderly writer, Julianna, suffering from dementia, loses her husband in an apparent home invasion. But she doesn't remember the night of his death, or much else surrounding that time, and has to piece together the sequence of events and try to determine whether one or more of the people around her is lying and whether one of them is a murderer.
How do you mess up a premise like that? In multiple ways, it turns out! Most egregiously,
It's pretty much all spoilery complaining under the cut.
The thing that annoyed me most about Julianna being killed halfway through the book is that it made everything which had been set up to that point just not matter anymore, such as her estrangement from her grown kids (never going to resolve that, I guess!) and the obvious but potentially interesting twist that her dementia was caused by someone close to her feeding her drugs. I was also DEEPLY annoyed that one particular red herring - Julianna thinks she saw her doctor (one of the murder suspects) in Scotland, where she had retired to recuperate after her husband's death; everyone else thinks she's hallucinating - was never actually explained! Was she actually hallucinating? We'll never know!
The actual mystery resolution .... makes less and less sense the more you think about it. Julianna writes thrillers that she often bases on real-life news stories. The killer is the subject of Julianna's latest book, trying to stop the book from being produced by - getting close to Julianna and murdering Julianna's husband in a complicated setup that was supposed to make it look like Julianna killed him in a dementia fugue state (the fact that it takes the characters half the book to even start suspecting Julianna suggests it wasn't a very good frame job) and slipping Julianna crazypills until she can no longer tell up from down. Then she fakes Julianna's suicide and ... ??? profit ???. (Honestly, if all she needed to do was stop the book's production, there was no need for the murder at all. The crazypills were plenty.)
I also feel like a lot of the unreliable narrator premise was wasted because there's very little of the book in which we really don't know what happened (aside from who actually killed Julianna's husband). There are enough witnesses and other people in the house around the time of the murder that there's no major mindfuck elements like, say, her husband wasn't even *in* the house, he died months earlier, he never existed ... etc ... but no, we know basically what happened at all times except for the actual murder itself.
Oh well, it was an entertaining read, even though it took me a while to finish it, and now I can amuse myself by thinking about how I'd do different things with the same premise. I really love unreliable narrators who are unreliable because they've had their memories messed with. Actually, if you have any recs for non-terrible books along those lines, I'd love to hear them!
How do you mess up a premise like that? In multiple ways, it turns out! Most egregiously,
Major spoiler
by killing off Julianna (in a particularly frustrating way, too) halfway through the book when she gets too close to the killer, and switching to her much less interesting daughter as the sole viewpoint character.It's pretty much all spoilery complaining under the cut.
The thing that annoyed me most about Julianna being killed halfway through the book is that it made everything which had been set up to that point just not matter anymore, such as her estrangement from her grown kids (never going to resolve that, I guess!) and the obvious but potentially interesting twist that her dementia was caused by someone close to her feeding her drugs. I was also DEEPLY annoyed that one particular red herring - Julianna thinks she saw her doctor (one of the murder suspects) in Scotland, where she had retired to recuperate after her husband's death; everyone else thinks she's hallucinating - was never actually explained! Was she actually hallucinating? We'll never know!
The actual mystery resolution .... makes less and less sense the more you think about it. Julianna writes thrillers that she often bases on real-life news stories. The killer is the subject of Julianna's latest book, trying to stop the book from being produced by - getting close to Julianna and murdering Julianna's husband in a complicated setup that was supposed to make it look like Julianna killed him in a dementia fugue state (the fact that it takes the characters half the book to even start suspecting Julianna suggests it wasn't a very good frame job) and slipping Julianna crazypills until she can no longer tell up from down. Then she fakes Julianna's suicide and ... ??? profit ???. (Honestly, if all she needed to do was stop the book's production, there was no need for the murder at all. The crazypills were plenty.)
I also feel like a lot of the unreliable narrator premise was wasted because there's very little of the book in which we really don't know what happened (aside from who actually killed Julianna's husband). There are enough witnesses and other people in the house around the time of the murder that there's no major mindfuck elements like, say, her husband wasn't even *in* the house, he died months earlier, he never existed ... etc ... but no, we know basically what happened at all times except for the actual murder itself.
Oh well, it was an entertaining read, even though it took me a while to finish it, and now I can amuse myself by thinking about how I'd do different things with the same premise. I really love unreliable narrators who are unreliable because they've had their memories messed with. Actually, if you have any recs for non-terrible books along those lines, I'd love to hear them!
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Actually, if you're okay with old-school pulp sci-fantasy, you might enjoy Henry Kuttner (and probably C. L. Moore also)'s The Dark World, which is amnesia + portal world; it's in the public domain (free download here) and one reason I chased it down is that it was apparently one of Roger Zelazny's influences for Corwin and Amber.
:sob: One of my favorites with that premise (sci fi) has characters (including the protagonist/narrator with the fucked memories) who are SUCH SOCIOPATHIC TRASH FIRES that I have never once been able to recommend that book to another living human being. I adore it but this is a very weird niche taste. (Especially weird because the other book I've read in that author's same setting is a very charming, modern-for-the-'90s updated Heinleinesque YA, so ZOMG TONE WHIPLASH.)
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Wait, if the first one is the book I think it is, what?
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OTOH, Orbital Resonance is a charming YA from the viewpoint of Melpomene Murray, who's one of a...maybe genetically engineered (?) generation of teenage? kids who have grown up either on a station orbiting Earth or possibly a ship leaving Earth (I can't remember details), and how she and her friends initially have Much Conflict (including bullying) vs. an Earth kid and then they reconcile, and there are a lot of really fun details about orbital life and future pedagogy and so on. It's really well done, and while the bullying bits won't be for everyone, it's MUCH more fun YA sf romp than Kaleidoscope Century, which is nihilism psychopathy all the way down. The two books are in the same setting; one of the secondary characters is the son of a woman who we see as a minor character child/teen in Kaleidoscope Century.
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You sent me a copy in 2015! It was brilliant! I don't think we discussed at the time that it had a charming YA counterpart! I feel confident I would have blown a fuse then!
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There's a third in the sequence, Candle, which has a memetic war in the older pre-cat-pics sense. I've read it but my opinion is that while it gives some additional context to things going on in Kaleidoscope Century (and I suppose more peripherally to Orbital Resonance), it's just not as interesting a book. I can't even remember thing one about its protagonist or ANY of the characters.
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I cannot imagine that working.
Do you recommend any other of his novels (as we veer wildly off-topic)? Kaleidoscope Century remains the only one I've read.
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He also wrote some sci fi big huge disaster books in the '90s or oughts iirc, Mother of Storms was one. They were competent but not particularly memorable.
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Sounds more like an L. Sprague de Camp homage; he wrote several screwball fantasies, mileage extremely variable. Lud-in-the-Mist may have bored you, but it did not depend on malaprops for its worldbuilding.
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I don't think there's half a person in Lud-in-the-Mist! There's a lot of blurriness between the dead and the land of Fairy, but I don't believe it ever results in anyone being split, just weirdly enthralled.
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Aaaaaaaaaaaaah I have never read and will never read this book and I am frustrated! The entire point of that kind of narrator is to carry them through to the end of their story!
It is probably a spoiler even to recommend it under these circumstances, but have you read Diana Wynne Jones' Archer's Goon (1984)?
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I have, and I really liked it! Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, Jones really likes that trope. I can think of at least two other books of hers that have it (Hexwood and Time of the Ghost are the ones I'm thinking of, at least to an extent in the latter case).
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Hexwood is one of my favorites of her novels. Fire and Hemlock also, which makes use of similarly divergent memories.
The trope shows up in secondary characters as well—I'm thinking of Howl's Moving Castle and A Tale of Time City, but I know there are other examples.
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Ah, Charmed Life. I think The Lives of Christopher Chant might be my very favourite DWJ, but Charmed Life is extra special to me because it was my first encounter with her and a big part of why I swung from genre-agnostic into fantasy fan.
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I read a book with a similar premise a long time ago…
(Pause while I run off and do some googling)
Oh, yeah, here we go - Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante. The main character is a woman who was a surgeon but has been diagnosed with dementia. A close friend has been killed and the victims fingers have been removed in exactly the kind of way you might expect a surgeon to do it. Protagonist does not remember committing the murder or why she might have done it.
It’s been so long since I read it that I don’t recall if it was any good or not though, so this isn’t a rec so much as a ‘this is a thing that exists’.
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Clean Escape
The Wikipedia article has more (NOTE: it spoils everything)
So, not quite this trope in that it's not the narrator who's unreliable as such, but it was close enough to the trope that I really liked it.
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It is amazing how much my brain, on being requested for books in this line, has been supplying movies and TV shows instead.
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The movie Angel Heart (maybe noirish???) is totally this trope but also so dark (in a spoilery way) that i don't tend to rec it either. Joe stopped trusting my movie night picks after we watched it together.
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I can't speak to the second season, but the first, self-contained season of Homecoming (2018) is one of my favorite recent deployments of this trope; it is near-future science fiction set in two different timelines with a central mystery of what happened in between them. On one side of the divide, the protagonist is a counselor employed at a couple of sub-contracted removes to work with veterans of multiple tours of duty in America's global forever wars. On the other, she has moved back in with her mother and waitresses at a crab shack. The bureaucratic irregularity of a long-shelved complaint pertaining to the facility where she worked and specifically the last case she worked on comes across the desk of an investigator for the DoD and the plot kicks off. It is not impossible to discern from early on where the general drift of the sfnal creepiness is going, but the narrative uses its multiple strands for more than just dazzle camouflage: one of my favorite stretches is the mid-season where the investigator looks to the protagonist like the government hunting her down and she looks to him like the linchpin of a cover-up and each of them is in their own separate conspiracy thriller and the audience can see it's more complicated and at the same time it's perfectly true. It was adapted from a podcast that I have never listened to and therefore cannot rate any fidelity to, but I was impressed by the show to the point where I remain puzzled it didn't even rate a look-in at the Hugos; its treatment of memory means that it becomes in many ways a meditation on how much of who we are is what we remember, by turns evoking trauma or dementia or dissociation without ever reducing to a metaphor. I found it extraordinarily good at a kind of low-grade accumulating skin-crawl which cannot be separated from a really goofy sense of humor played bone-dry straight. (I wrote very briefly about my favorite character in the series because he personifies this latter quality.) I watched it in 2020 on the strength of
Also in 2020 I discovered Anthony Asquith's Libel (1959) which is a late noir that feels like science fiction from the way it handles its otherwise realist conceit: the protagonist is on trial for stealing another man's identity and thanks to the circumstances of war under which it is supposed to have happened, he can't remember if it's true. I watched it cold, loved it desperately, it is surprisingly available on Amazon and other streaming services. I'd never heard of it before it turned up on TCM. (My review is spoiler-filled, but it was so beautiful that I had to talk about it.)
[edit] OH. RIGHT. Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998). Watch the director's cut without the explanatory narration. It is entirely about this trope and hugely metafictional and also a completely cromulent sf noir. My favorite character is the one played by Kiefer Sutherland for reasons that are not apparent until nearly the end of the film but will be incredibly obvious. I wrote about it a little when I saw it for the first time in 2011 and again when it turned up at the 'Thon in 2018.
The movie Angel Heart (maybe noirish???) is totally this trope but also so dark (in a spoilery way) that i don't tend to rec it either.
Fortunately, I've been told I would love it by Gemma Files, I've just never managed to get around to renting and seeing it.
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Now the book you read killing the narrator and switching like that would drive me so bonkers! Gah!
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The thing that annoyed me most about Julianna being killed halfway through the book is that it made everything which had been set up to that point just not matter anymore, such as her estrangement from her grown kids (never going to resolve that, I guess!)
MADDENING. And a total waste of a mindfuck, as you say. Plus it feels especially annoying for the killer to be an outsider who got close for the purpose of killing. There might be a good book in, say, the daughter or somebody being the killer, and they were seen by the Julianna character but she's got dementia, and the book is from her POV and she's stressing about if her mother remembers or is pretending not to or is about to tell or what.
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ETA: Also, oh my god, I think I would have noped out immediately upon hitting that massive spoiler. No! What a betrayal of your novel's premise!