Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California is remarkably good—a bold, fresh meditation that feels more “real” than anything I’ve read lately. In our current age, any sense of a predictable present has been fractured; reality has been shattered with a hammer, strewn about in jagged pieces. In the best of times, to be a singular “self” can be a deeply unfathomable condition. To be a self, alive, while navigating our now is another beast entirely, and grief further enacts this fracturing. In Dead in Long Beach, California, Coral’s grief, her unusual decision-making in the direct wake of the suicide of her brother, Jay, untethers her from normalcy. Zigzagging away from any prescribed norms of what one should do in such circumstances, Coral takes over his phone, responding to messages and crafting social media as a still-alive Jay, maintaining distance from loved ones, and keeping his death to herself. Grief is exacerbated in a social-scape that tends to bring out one’s loneliness—particularly if your gender or race leads to an additional, limiting isolation.

Early on, the novel lets it be known that it has the concept of “self” on its mind: “Like most people less than fifty years old and more than nine, Coral was a curated exhibit, carefully constructed in the presentation of self.” But the book is interested specifically in the manufactured self amid an ecosystem of unreality. On first read, the reader will likely glean the novel’s structure—that each section follows a day in the week after Jay’s passing and will end with an excerpt from Coral’s Wildfire (a sci-fi fantasy graphic novel set in an alternate dystopia where debt rules its power structures). But just when you’re lulled into the security of that formula, three days in, Blackburn flips it, putting something else in Wildfire’s position: Coral’s internet feed.

“The thing known as the Internet lost its imagination and cannibalized itself,” we’re told, before encountering the “2021 Sunday 1:05pm Top Stories.” Upsetting headlines like “NINE-YEAR-OLD MASS-SHOOTING SURVIVOR TESTIFIES BEFORE CONGRESS” and “A GENERATION OF MEN DON’T WANT TO HAVE SEX AND ARE WILLING TO KILL FOR THAT TO BE OKAY” ring both familiar and otherworldly. You can feel the true-to-life lifelessness of media sculpted by algorithm, by clickbait, by sites run without editors. These headlines are examples of the absurdity of the world Coral scrolls through. Readers will relate to their rewriting of what’s real. Their extremity feeling both one detail too exaggerated for the present yet entirely plausible in a possible tomorrow.

Wrapped up in the internet’s reality warp and its disruption of the social self is gender’s own untethering—evidenced by Coral’s projections onto others as they maneuver their respective gender expectations. At times, Coral seems jealous of the low expectations set out for her late brother (how “men don’t think about that junk,” how she is “better than [her] brother and still alone”). Actions she questions in her niece, Khadija, how Khadija speaks “in two voices,” betray what Coral believes is respectable behavior. While Coral interprets this duality as phony, as a young teenager doing anything she can to satiate her “desire for More,” there might be a more generous reading: “It is said that trauma lives in voices,” our narrator tells us, and later, “We believe all voices are permanent records of damage.” Any moral indictment Coral’s passing doesn’t hold water: we watch Coral take on other voices and lie for seven days. Like Khadija, Coral expands her reality beyond its own constraints, contending for more control. And maybe under these circumstances, that’s a kind of freedom. For a queer woman. For a young Black girl in a world that can take so much from you. It’s fair to surmise that Coral’s ventures into Jay’s persona—his phone, his social media accounts—are also a ventriloquism, a fan fiction that explores the bounds of different gender expectations. A new opportunity to survive being alive.

The novel’s transcendent feat comes clear in time, not just by what is being said but by who might be saying it. “We say many things that are not really true. We do not say that each death is different, each goodbye will rip in new and unforeseeable ways, and the pain is never exactly the same,” our narrator(s) tell us. (Of the conditions surrounding Jay’s death, the book is spare, seemingly uninvested in pontifications of death by suicide. It is a facet of humanity, with its own ripple effects, similar and dissimilar to other deaths, the work suggests.) The collective “we” at the book’s open feels, at first, palpably alien, like some futuristic grouping of cyborg children: “We are students of her time, this time, and as students we practice what is known…with a reckless disregard for things like pain or worse.” Later, the collective reads as much less strange: an alternate voice and self for Coral, fiction as cover. More all-knowing, inasmuch as any being can know and reflect on humanity itself, can imagine the truths of another person or a collective. What felt impossibly prophetic and futuristic is actually just the experience of living life. An existential reframing. A stitching together of one’s various selves, decisions, and impulses—lived and wished. The wading through of fresh clarities to find a new, more positive detachment. A second self. This novel is brilliant work. Venita Blackburn is telling the truth.•

Join us on July 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Blackburn will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Dead in Long Beach, California. Register for the Zoom conversation here.