Nested within Venita Blackburn’s queer, mind-bending work of fiction is a graphic novel without pictures—we are, each of us, this ambitious structure hints, a universe of characters. The novel begins with a perplexing act: after finding her brother dead, a graphic novelist, Coral, receives a text from his daughter and proceeds to go about her sibling’s business, impersonating him not only to his daughter but also to his friends and others. Her story is told by a plural narrator, cool and curious machine librarians, artificial intelligence from the future, who study humans. Paradoxically, however, even as the machines narrate this period of loss in Coral’s life, they are also her invented characters. Dead in Long Beach, California wrestles with grief, but it also dramatizes how existence plays out for authors and their fans, in art’s wild capacity to transmute into other works of art when it crosses from an author’s subjectivity into a reader’s, in the novelist’s role as a pretender, and in the human ability—or awkward inability—to imagine ourselves into other people’s lives. In this moment, when what it means to be human feels under fire, this record of who we are now, in all our glory, horror, alienation, and quirks, couldn’t be more vital.
‘Dead in Long Beach, California’
Venita Blackburn’s novel is the California Book Club’s July 2024 selection.
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