Dead in Long Beach, California: A Novel
A Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the 2025 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2024. One of NPR's 2024 Books We Love. Longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
“Told by machines from the future, Blackburn’s idiosyncratic grief novel is as freshly devastating as they come.” —The New York Times Book Review
“You can try bracing yourself for the ride this story takes you on, but it’s best to just surrender. Your wig is going to fall off no matter what you do.” —Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives
Coral is the first person to discover the body of her brother, Jay, in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother.
Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles—and triples—down on posing as her brother, risking not only her sanity but also her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadija. As Coral’s swirl of lies closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes entangled with her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present.
A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind’s capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.
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Community Reviews
Did I love this book? I’m not sure. Did I feel compelled to finish it? Yes. This whirlwind of a book made me feel so many different emotions. Did I almost stop listening? Yes, multiple times. But something kept me there and I think it was the fascination of the unraveling of the main character and finally letting go of my need to understand and instead just go with my feelings. Was that the point? To feel as confused, unsteady, and untethered as Coral felt? To know that it will happen to all of us one day? To ME? If so, then bravo Venita Blackburn!
This book requires some thought from the reader and it is not light reading. There are triggers such as suicide, finding a loved one, and grief. If you like a stream-of-consciousness style, science fiction, satire, etc. then you might like this book. Blackburn uses interesting literary devices that are repetitive, but are there for a reason. I will read the book again. I believe it has a lot to offer me personally.
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