Coral, the protagonist of Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is so disoriented after discovering her dead brother’s body that she takes his cellphone and begins to pose as him. Coral isn’t trying to steal her brother Jay’s identity when she texts her niece, Khadija, or an unknown woman named Summer. But her grief-induced hysteria forces her to confront her own fractured identity and the familial struggles that caused it. Coral, a successful novelist of dystopian fiction, is a woman from Compton whose mother left when she was young. Her father, doing the best he could under the circumstances, was distant at best, which left Coral and Jay, two years apart, to fend for themselves mostly. Jay’s suicide shatters Coral, and in the week in which she impersonates him via texts, recollections from her childhood and adolescence illuminate her current dysfunction. 

Blackburn’s conceit of having a sister pose as her dead brother is a clever one, but she takes it a step further, and maybe too far, by filtering the novel’s point of view through characters from Coral’s acclaimed dystopian novel Wildfire. Dead in Long Beach, California is narrated omnisciently by what can be best described as AI “librarians” in a post-apocalyptic world who are “responsible for telling this story mostly because Coral cannot.” The disembodied narrators state that “Coral wrote us into existence. She made us, and we made her money and brought her minor fame in exchange. We are students of her time, this time, and as students, we practice what is known.” The novel’s success hinges on one’s acceptance of this metafictional gambit: Will you buy into the idea that a successful novelist’s characters are narrating her impending breakdown? Blackburn chose to walk a very thin tightrope, and the novel is a constant balancing act. She falls on occasion, but the result is a moving, if infuriating, experimental novel that shines when it leans into its realist elements.