Agnes, We’re Not Murderers

Alexander’s ambitious solo debut (after None of This Is an Invitation, written with Katie Jean Shinkle) gleefully plays with gothic conventions. The metafictional tale moves between black and red text, with footnotes, also in red, written by a mysterious author. Partly taking place in Styria, the setting of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic vampire tale, Carmilla, the black text follows Agnes as she is visited by the vampiric Mary, whose arrival heralds the spread of a strange illness. This contagion also extends into the footnotes, written from the United States during the Covid pandemic and offering a reflection on illness, grief, and queer life. The annotator also drops in plentiful references to gothic classics like “Bluebeard” and Jane Eyre alongside modern writers like Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, creating a rich sense of intertextuality. In the main narrative, characters initially appear clearly defined, but their identities quickly become untethered, especially as the footnotes frequently redirect readers to other parts of the novel (“to learn more of this poisoning, turn to page 193”), revisiting scenes under shifting circumstances as the narrative cleverly loops back on itself. Alexander embraces this formal instability, assembling a gothic bricolage that proves as ingenious as it is demanding. (June)