Friday 8 July 2011

I love this book.

My favourite book of the past year--and I read a ton of books--is Megan Abbott's Bury Me Deep.

I realised recently that I have a special place in my odd little heart for stories where the protagonist ends up with a skeleton in his or her closet--usually literally--and it's a disastrous spiritual burden, a gory guilty secret. I'm thinking of Richard Wright's Native Son and the horror of the discovery of the bones he's hidden in the furnace. Or Hitchcock's Psycho and the car that keeps popping to the surface of the swamp like the villain in your worst nightmare. In Bury Me Deep it's a pair of suitcases that the heroine is left lugging all over the country (I don't think that's giving too much away seeing as it's based on a well-known true story, the Winnie Ruth Judd 'Trunk Murders'). This kind of story makes you feel scared and ashamed and the best kind of sullied.

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