South African author Lauren Beukes loves genre-bending. Her first novel, Moxyland, created a futuristic cyberpunk world; Zoo City is a noir thriller with magic. The Shining Girls, her best yet, turns The Time Traveler's Wife upside down with a mixture of time travel and serial killing that works wickedly well.
Beukes offers 62 short chapters in a nonlinear time sequence. At the story's center are Harper Curtis, a sadistic killer, and Kirby Mizrachi, one of his victims. Harper first visits Kirby in June 1974, giving the 6 1/2-year-old girl an orange plastic pony that she thinks looks "kinda dopey." When he leaves, he tells her: "I'll see you when you're all grown up."
1931: Harper kills an old woman in Chicago and steals her big warm coat. The pocket holds an old key--for The House. Inside The House is a room filled with souvenirs. Why do they seem familiar to him? Harper soon understands the time-traveling power of the room--and its demand for "potential."
Harper uses the room to pursue strong women--his "shining girls"--like Zora ('43), Alice ('51) and Jin-Sook ('93). Then he visits a grown-up Kirby. This time, however, it's different. His brutal attack fails, and she survives. He returns to the room and the past, to escape--for now.
Kirby gets a job as an intern at the Chicago Sun-Times. Through old newspaper files, she learns about similar attacks and odd souvenirs left by the bodies of the women who died over the decades.
Interesting subplots add depth to Beukes's powerful and unsettling hybrid of a story, as she crosses a feminist novel with narrative twists and turns reminiscent of Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher