My life in books

I am really not sure what to say about Tade Thompson’s novella The Murders of Molly Southborne. It’s an amazing piece of work with an emotional kick at the end that doesn’t let you go for quite some time.

Molly Southborne is different. Whenever she is injured, whenever she bleeds, her blood spawns copies of her, other Mollies, murderous Mollies, most of whom are intent on killing her, and sometimes other people too.

She grows up on a farm with only her parents for company. When she’s young, they kill the mollies for her. As she gets older, they teach her how to be as careful as she can be not to injure herself, how to neutralise the blood she can’t avoid shedding with bleach and fire. But there’s always something you can’t avoid, so they also teach her how to fight and kill the mollies, how to dispose of the bodies.

So many bodies, so many copies of herself.

Eventually she grows up, and goes away to university, and makes contacts that give her the chance to learn more about herself and the mollies. After her parents die - killed by mollies themselves - she learns, maybe, why she is the way she is. But none of this knowledge brings comfort, and there seems to be no way out of the cycle of creating and killing mollies.

Until she thinks of a way.

This story walks the line between science fiction and horror, rather like such stories as The Thing and The Body Snatchers, both of which are also stores about identity and infection and threat. It’s probably no accident that, as we discover at one point, Molly’s mother was a sleeper agent, a source of infection hidden in the body of the state, or that Molly spreads a slow and hidden infection as well as creating the mollies that can pass as human. This is about the visceral horror of something horribly wrong within the self, and in the ways that the self reproduces. And like the tropes it plays on, it gets inside of you and doesn’t let go.