Dead in Long Beach, California

In Blackburn’s bold and formally inventive debut novel (after the collection How to Wrestle a Girl), a Black gay graphic novelist impersonates her dead brother. Coral has discovered her brother Jay’s body in his Long Beach, Calif., apartment, after his death by suicide. As her grief moves in its own particular way, she neglects to tell her niece Khadija or others the news, and replies to text messages meant for Jay in his voice. Blackburn’s entire novel is narrated by the mysterious chorus from Coral’s popular graphic novel Wildfire, and Blackburn alternates from chronicles of Coral’s day-to-day swiping on dating apps and concerns that Khadija will catch on to her deception to long sections from Wildfire’s AI-like chorus, which describes the detritus of humanity after an apocalypse. Also in the mix are Coral’s flashbacks to her teen years growing up in Compton in the 1990s, when she had a crush on Jay’s girlfriend, the future mom of Khadija, and later coming out to 14-year-old Khadija but not to Jay. While the excerpts from Wildfire can be dense and obscure, Blackburn is an excellent prose stylist. Coral’s sections are full of acerbic wit (an “exhausting” trip to Medieval Times for Khadija’s benefit is one of those “miserable situations” people enter into “with the belief that someone they loved would be happy there”). This ambitious effort is worth a look. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Jan.)