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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes – review. Shining light … Lauren Beukes has enormous fun with her time-travel concept. Shining light … Lauren Beukes has enormous fun with her time-travel concept. L auren Beukes's previous novel, the Arthur C Clarke award-winning Zoo City , was an urban fantasy with shades of detective fiction: a grittier version of His Dark Materials recast in South Africa. In her new book, a man named Harper Curtis living in depression-era Chicago comes upon a house – or House, as it is capitalised in the novel – that is a portal to other times. Inside there's a dead man on the floor, and on the walls a constellation of unrelated artefacts, among them a pair of butterfly wings, a baseball card and a contraceptive pill. Next to these objects are the names of women, scrawled in Harper's own handwriting. When he looks out of the window the world beyond seems to be in a time-lapse film: "The houses across the way change. The paint strips away, recolours itself, strips away again through snow and sun and trash tangled up with leaves blowing down the street." We know Harper isn't much troubled by conscience because he throttled a blind woman to get the key to the House in the first place, and once inside he is quickly overcome with the urge to kill the "shining girls" signified by the names and keepsakes. His motives are mysterious. There are hints of the bliss-in-murder mysticism found in Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell , but for the most part his reasons don't go any further than a penchant for cruelty, worked up by the inexplicable forces of the House. And so he moves between 1929 and 1993, slaying his predetermined victims as he goes and leaving anachronistic items with the bodies. For an extra kick he enjoys masturbating over the scenes of his crimes, decades before or after he commits them: "He likes the juxtaposition of memory and change. It makes the experience sharper." Not all his attacks are successful. Kirby, a young woman living in 1989, survives one of his assaults and vows to find her would-be killer. She becomes an intern at the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper to get her hands on evidence of a possible link between her ordeal and a series of other murders, befriending a lovesick old hack to help her with her quest. Meanwhile Harper is looping the loop through time, hoping to bump into Kirby again so he can finish the job. Beukes has enormous fun with the concept. When Harper travels to 1988 he "stands entranced by the whirling and flaying brush strips of a car wash". He visits the Sears Tower under construction in 1972, and then returns a year later – or a day later, in his time – to take the elevator to the top. "The view makes him feel like a god." Yet it is 1930s Chicago that is the most pungent and evocative era in the novel. Beukes's writing is at its most surprising here, recalling the cadences of Denis Johnson: when Harper surveys the sorry patients of a run-down hospital, they are described as having "the same look of resignation he's seen in farm horses on their last legs, ribs as pronounced as the cracks and furrows in the dead earth they strain the plow against. You shoot a horse like that." Beukes's craft has improved in other ways, too. As with the heroines of Zoo City and Moxyland , Kirby is barbed and sarcastic, but she's less likely to reduce everything to a quip. The problem is that the killing is so brutal and pitiless that it threatens to overwhelm the rest of the novel. In a way it's commendable that Beukes hasn't softened the violence, but it doesn't sit well with the tricksy, jigsaw quality of the story. This is an entertaining novel that will be read with keen attention, but the reader may end up slightly confused by the meaning of it all. The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes – review. H arper is not your average serial killer. "How old are you?" he asks Kirby Mazrachi, a grubby six-year-old with crazy hair who grows up to become the kickass star of Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls . Then he gives her an orange plastic pony. "Here we go. Round and round, like your ferris wheel. I'll see you when you're all grown-up. Look out for me, OK, sweetheart? I'll come back for you." Harper, you see, can time travel (imagine the psychological tortures Hannibal Lecter could have imposed on Clarice Starling if he'd been party to this gift). A penniless, murderous war veteran in 1930s Chicago, he stumbles into an abandoned house and finds his destiny. Looking at the walls, he sees the names of women written in his own handwriting; out of the window, he sees "whole seasons whirring past", and finds he can step into the time of his choice. He uses this to stalk his "shining girls", extraordinary women who live in the Chicagos of the decades that follow: 1972's Margot, fighting for women's right to choose; Willie, the female architect in 1954, Zora, the black welder in 1943. To stalk them in childhood, and kill them in adulthood, addicted to "the knife twist and the hot slip of a girl's insides spilling out". Kirby is one of them, but she's the one who got away, and is obsessed, in adulthood, with tracking down her killer. The South African Beukes, an award-winning science fiction author, takes her first step into thrillers with this high-concept novel which was signed up by its publisher in a big-stakes auction. Beukes does many things right. Kirby, digging through newspaper archives and interviewing endless witnesses about unsolved female murders, is enticingly, punkishly tough. She's the sort of girl who wanders her house at night as a child "because the thought of waiting for the monster to come to her is unbearable", who – while undergoing Harper's extraordinarily brutal attack, narrated by Beukes without a shadow of emotion – thinks "don't, please don't" but also "don't you fucking dare". Beukes also – perhaps thanks to her science fiction background – doesn't make the mistake of trying to explain time travel, or make sense of it. The house just is. It does what it does. As does Harper, a psychotic blank at the heart of the novel; Beukes saves her empathising, her ability to create vivid, glowing characters, for the women he kills. This works, usually, although setting herself the task of summoning up 1950s Chicago in a few pages leads to some shoehorning. And some of her creations are pulled off better than others: Alice, her 1940s transsexual, is thoughtful and moving; Mal, the druggie who sees Harper coming and going in the 80s, is more clumsily drawn. For sheer, page-turning nerve, however, The Shining Girls is going to take some beating this summer. Grant Beukes her time-travel conceit and you're in for a wild, brutal ride through the 20th century, in the company of one of the sarkiest, most resilient heroines you're likely to meet this year. The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes. HE CLENCHES the orange plastic pony in the pocket of his sports coat. It is sweaty in his hand. Mid-summer here, too hot for what he’s wearing. But he has learned to put on a uniform for this purpose; jeans in particular. He takes long strides – a man who walks because he’s got somewhere to be, despite his gimpy foot. Harper Curtis is not a moocher. And time waits for no one. Except when it does. The girl is sitting cross-legged on the ground, her bare knees white and bony as birds’ skulls and grass-stained. She looks up at the sound of his boots scrunching on the gravel, but only long enough for him to see that her eyes are brown under that tangle of grubby curls, before she dismisses him and goes back to her business. Harper is disappointed. He had imagined, as he approached, that they might be blue; the color of the lake, deep out, where the shoreline disappears and it feels like you’re in the middle of the ocean. Brown is the color of shrimping, when the mud is all churned up in the shallows and you can’t see shit for shit. ‘What are you doing?’ he says, putting brightness in his voice. He crouches down beside her in the threadbare grass. Really, he’s never seen a child with such crazy hair. Like she got spun round in her own personal dust devil, one that tossed up the assortment of random junk splayed around her. A cluster of rusty tin cans, a broken bicycle wheel tipped on its side, spokes jabbing outwards. Her attention is focused on a chipped teacup, turned upside down, so that the silvered flowers on the lip disappear into the grass. The handle has broken off, leaving two blunt stumps. ‘You having a tea party, sweetheart?’ he tries again. ‘It’s not a tea party,’ she mutters into the petal-shaped collar of her checked shirt. Kids with freckles shouldn’t be so earnest, he thinks. It doesn’t suit them. ‘Well, that’s fine,’ he says, ‘I prefer coffee anyways.

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