This article was taken from the May 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Lauren Beukes has a murder wall. "It's full of crazy pictures, three different timelines, murder dates..." The elaborate web of string, photos and objects above her desk helped Beukes to plot her latest book,The Shining Girls, about a time-travelling serial killer. "It's been completely insane trying to keep track of all of this," she says. Her other essential tool: "Scrivener."
The novel, published this month, began as a tweet: she mentioned the idea in passing before a friend told her to delete the tweet and write a book (the tweet is indeed now deleted, lost to posterity). The story opens in 30s Chicago, where Harper Curtis finds a key to a strange house. The house lets him travel through time and points out his victims (the girls who "shine"). He embarks on a killing spree with a twist: he visits each of his victims as children, teenagers and adults, leaving them with a memento to mark them out, then returns years later to kill them (it turns out that a house-shaped time machine is the perfect getaway vehicle). Each victim's backstory is meticulously researched and the body count soon hits double figures: "I had a bunch of others I was going to kill as well, but I got murder fatigue," the Cape Town-based writer says.
Fate catches up with Curtis when Kirby Mazrachi survives her murder and comes after him. "I'm going with linear, fatalistic time travel, which is when you can't change it. It's Greek tragedy -- Oedipus trying to resist his fate and, no matter what happens, reinforcing it."
Beukes's previous two books,
Moxyland and Zoo City, featured South African cities but her next, Broken Monsters, is set in Detroit, with killings even stranger, she says, than The Shining Girls'. "There's this crazy insane hoarder room in the back of my mind, all kinds of weird stuff I've kept back," the 36-year-old says. "Actually, it's more like a mad science experiment, with all sorts of horrible mutations."
The Shining Girls is published on 25 April
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
