A little while back, I was getting frustrated with the sharpness of the divide between speculative fiction and literary fiction; specifically in their guidelines. While I knew literary fiction often delved into the supernatural, the guidelines for every market would say, very bluntly, “No speculative elements.” And the speculative markets? They would say “Has to have speculative elements.” On paper, this seems pretty blatant; but as someone whose mind rests very delicately on the edge between neurosis and psychosis and who’s always seen the world differently, it gets more complicated. Are my hallucinations “speculative”? Is plurality and dissociative identity disorder sufficient to make a story fantasy — or is that more than a little insulting? (Certainly it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)
It was after reading some of the classics of magical realism that the word came to me: that I was writing schizorealist work. Much like how magical realism depicts the world, the real world, through the eyes of a colonized people, the genre of schizorealism — if it were to exist — depicts the real world through the eyes of the psychotic, the schizophrenic, the plural. The disturbed, to say it the most general way possible, but in our own voices. This is our real, I would want it to say. But it’s mostly stayed an idea in my head… until now. The Death Scene Artist is the first book I’ve read since then that has met (artistically; I will make no commentary on the author!) my criteria for schizorealism, and it does it absolutely fucking beautifully.
The Death Scene Artist by Andrew Wilmot takes place in Hollywood, as a perpetual extra dying of cancer blogs about her disastrous love affair with a man known for playing death scenes — and only death scenes. Never the leading man, never the villain, but only ever the character who dies in the first few minutes, or at the hands of the slasher, or as the doomed pilot or childhood best friend. This is told in pieces, as M— flips between anecdotes in her blog (how they met, her childhood, her appointments with her therapist, her relationships with her friends and her sister), and intercuts fragments of scripts that M— and D— (the death scene artist himself) acted in together. This is already a book positioned to be a perfect fever dream of an experience.
And of course, it starts off with her talking about skinning people.
Very, very casually.
I love this book.
I won’t ruin any more than that in terms of the plot, but what I will warn about is that the book delves into mental illness and partner violence, as well as emotional parental abuse and body dysmorphia. The latter in particular is fascinating in how it pinged in very transgender ways without explicitly having either character be trans. (Wilmot themself uses they/them pronouns and has described this as a trans narrative, which I love. And certainly a second read for me will probably bring even more of that to the surface.) There is also a death by drug overdose and two to cancer, for those who struggle with those topics. More broadly, if you’re having a lot of dissociation, I would…wait. If you’re healing from a lot of dissociation, this might help.
I found myself aching for a little more of D–‘s perspective as I was reading. I don’t think this is really a flaw of the book so much as part of the point; despite knowing that normally it’d be his story (or a version of it prepared and packaged for the press) that I’d be hearing, I still longed to hear it. It doesn’t help that M— is such a surly character, but once again, this I think is part of the message, not a failure of it. Just because a character is charming and persuasive and lost doesn’t mean that they’re in the right, or the one who needs to be heard.
The Death Scene Artist by Andrew Wilmot is published by Wolsak & Wynn; you can buy it directly from the publisher here.
[Like my reviews? You can support me on Patreon over here!]
Elliott Dunstan 