Marion

Marion, inspired by Psycho, takes Hitchcock’s iconic scene – a demonic shadow behind the shower curtain – and turns it on its head. The intended victim, the cute blonde, the barbie doll, knees the demon in the balls, takes the knife, stabs him, and stabs again, and again, and again. The repetition demands, and gets, an explanation.

Because so far it’s not a funny book, as hyped. More a feminist tract on familiar lines: the protagonist exploited by her boss, dangled as a lure before clients, used as the dog’s body to smuggle a huge bribe to the bank.

And in that bank rebellion stirs. The woman who will shortly call herself Marion has a sister married to a wife-beater. Ready cash would procure sister’s escape. It’s late on Friday and the teller won’t take the deposit without authorisation. “Marion” walks out of the bank with $100,000 in her tote bag, catches a bus to ride to the rescue of her sister, and the bus breaks down. Marion finds a cabin at an archaic motel complete with Norm, a mad innkeeper, his sequestered mother, enough suspense to outdo Hitchcock and it doesn’t get really funny until Marion starts to work out what she’s going to do with the body.

From this point she refers to corpses by their given names. Because it doesn’t stop with Norm. Marion, after all, is an alter ago for the woman who is dependent on Mom, who is not dead but distant: an alcoholic whose spirit imbues her daughter, voicing encouragement, spurring her on to face challenges that would have seemed bizarre, incredible, out of this world before she first picked up the knife and used it. Yet challenges proliferate; situations that once would have been insuperable now seem to invite murder as if certain men, and particularly obnoxious ones, are born victims. Only disposal is a problem but women are natural improvisers accustomed as they are to the manifold uses of duct tape, plastic curtains, duvets, the packaging of bulky objects. “Deposition” is the cool technical term but naming the items for disposal makes them more personal; it’s kinder, amusing, besides serving a practical purpose: identification. Names help us keep track: readers as well as fictional characters.

For balance, to maintain the illusion that this is a literary work rather than a bloodfest, Marion shortly acquires her opponent in Hannah, a rookie P.I. They share chapters, Marion in July at the start of her crazy career, Hannah two weeks later, ostensibly on the trail of another missing woman. This investigation leads her to Marion who is just keeping her head above water while disposing of more bodies. Not before time she is joined by her sister and by Mom who, nobly enduring the process of Cold Turkey, manages to remain unfazed and inspirational in the face of a crescendo of homicide.

 As Hannah closes in on the truth (trailed by a horde of bumbling cops) there is feverish activity in the family camp, the trio encumbered with cadavers but with their fleet of cars to hand which are now utilized in a session of Musical Chairs that commands all the reader’s concentration, spiced through with alarm. Switches and timing and alternative dump sites are managed like a military operation; all communication is online, hiccups smothered, mistakes adjusted, one or two mirrors smoked and the ultimate presentation appears as smooth as silk.

Makes for an entertaining finale: domesticated, very feminine, very proper.