The 22 Murders of Madison May

May 3, 2021
At the start of this middling SF thriller from Barry (Providence), Madison May, a 22-year-old New York City real estate agent, shows a prospective client, creepy college dropout Clayton Hors, a dilapidated house in Queens. Hors tells Madison, “I’m not from this world,” before fatally stabbing her. New York Daily News reporter Felicity Staples, who’s assigned the story of Madison’s murder, notes a resemblance between an image at the crime scene and a logo on the hat of a man she saw outside the house for sale, later identifying that logo as belonging to a juice company. Before Felicity can learn more, she encounters the bystander on a subway platform, only to have him push her onto the tracks. Felicity survives, but she’s somehow shifted to an alternate world slightly different from her own. After finding out that Madison was killed in this world as well, Felicity embarks on a desperate quest to return to her own reality and stop future murders of Madison in multiple parallel universes. The characterizations are uninspired, and Barry fails to make Felicity’s response to her mind-bending situation psychologically plausible. Hopefully, this talented author will return to form next time. Agent: Luke Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit.

May 1, 2021
Someone is killing young Madison May--over and over and over again. Though he's endlessly inventive and entertaining, Barry isn't exactly prolific, so it's a welcome surprise to see a new novel arriving so soon after Providence (2020), his diverting space opera. This book isn't completely out of his wheelhouse, featuring as it does some unsurprising rips in the space-time continuum, but it's a little more grounded than usual, closer to a clever riff on unwanted resurrection, � la the movie Happy Death Day. The titular Maddie is a real estate agent in Queens when we meet her, trying to follow her profession's primal rules ("Teeth, Tits, Hair") when she meets potential buyer Clayton Hors, who not only identifies as some kind of otherworldly outsider, but also declares, "You know, I love you, Madison. In every world. Even when you don't love me back." Oh, and then promptly murders her. The only person who thinks this case is wonky is political reporter Felicity Staples of the Daily News, whose situation gets even stranger when a guy named Hugo Garrelly--who looks exactly like Clayton Hors--gives her a strange metal egg right before pushing her into the path of a moving subway train. In subsequent lives, Maddie is an up-and-coming actress or a TV weather girl or a waitress or a student--all ending in her murder by someone who can effortlessly move between the parallel worlds where she exists. Felicity is understandably disoriented when she too starts experiencing these different dimensions, in which her life is just a little bit different every time but she always remembers who and what she was before. It's all very noodle-bending, time-travel-y science fiction, but Barry is playing with a very specific set of tropes, as Maddie notices just prior to one of her many demises: "Oh, she thought. It's a horror movie." A very clever, unpredictable little murder mystery with some bittersweet tones about the things we do for love.

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May 1, 2021
Madison May is a real estate agent when readers first meet her, showing a house to a man named Clayton Hors. He seems to think he knows her from somewhere-- and then he murders her. Through an accident of timing, Felicity Staples, usually a political journalist, takes the call about the murder and gets the first glimpse at the crime scene. She notices something odd in photos of the scene, and instead of letting it go, she pursues the lead. This leads her to Hugo, who has escaped from Sing Sing to her slice of the multiverse. Felicity--and Hugo--chase Clayton through various worlds, and he murders Madison May in almost all of them. He's a straightforward type: he tells Madison it's her fault as he murders her, over and over again. Felicity is an ordinary person out of her depth, and traveling with her as she comes to terms with the fact that she'll never go back to her own life has some satisfying moments. While there's no room for anything like a happy ending, the survivors make the best of what they have.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 25, 2021
The idea of parallel universes might once have been exotic, but between public interest in physics, the increasing popularity of science fiction books and movies, and the rise of the Mandela Effect (a term denoting collectively held false memories), I think I can dispense with explaining it. In Max Barry’s latest novel Madison May is a student—but in some parallel worlds she is an actor or sells real estate. In 22 of them she has been brutally murdered. The Madisons are all different but the killer is the same, hunting her across different realities. Felicity Staples is a journalist covering her first murder and gets caught up in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse between the violent obsessive and those hunting him. Unwittingly, she too becomes able to move between subtly different worlds, driven by an obsession of her own: to save the next Madison. Weird setting(s) aside, this is a classic catch-the-stalker thriller, and while the parallel worlds aspect of the story is clever and important to the characters and narrative, it avoids Inception-style confusion and stays comprehensible. The 22 Murders of Madison May is a dynamic and intense book, not just for speculative fiction readers but also for anyone who likes a good thriller. This is one for fans of Claire North, Blake Crouch and of course Barry’s other books. Stefen Brazulaitis is the owner of Stefen’s Books in Perth.