As one might glean from the title, Murder Bimbo, Rebecca Novack's debut novel is a boldly errant story that gleefully upends narrative and character expectations. The plot centers on a 32-year-old sex worker, Murder Bimbo, recruited to kill a toxic political figure she calls "Meat Neck." Novack begins her tale after the murder, when Murder Bimbo is in hiding, e-mailing her story from a cabin in the woods to a podcast host whose show, Justice for Bimbos, she deems ideal for sharing her experience with the wider world.
"There are two stories," Murder Bimbo states later, the one about Meat Neck and the one about X, Murder Bimbo's ex-girlfriend, who introduced her to the language of radical theory and for whom her obsessive ardor still lingers. "And then there's the third story about how I mounted both of those tales before I knew where either was going and corralled them into one perfect, wild saga." To say more would ruin the twists that fuel the brilliance of this primarily epistolary novel.
Novack fantastically skewers straight, white men in Murder Bimbo, including their sexual desires and their ability to fail upward, but what makes the jabs hit deeper is Novak's careful character complexity, which accumulates in layers of complicity as the plot progresses. White women don't escape evisceration as Novack aims some of the most analytically sharp send-ups at politically aware former activists who return to comfortable upper-middle-class life after dabbling in radicalism in their youth. Murder Bimbo is a phenomenally impish debut. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator