Alice Bolin’s debut essay collection begins with the familiar corpse at the centre of American storytelling.

Enter the murdered woman. We know her. She's the one whose death gives everybody else something to do. From Twin Peaks and detective fiction to Britney Spears, Joan Didion, witches, werewolves and Los Angeles itself, Bolin examines how women are repeatedly turned into atmosphere, their bodies made narratively useful precisely by being endangered, controlled or absent. 

The book widens from media criticism into memoir and literary criticism, trawling where aesthetic fascination becomes cultural habit. We see the glamorous damaged woman, the detective who understands her after death, the city that seems built to produce disappearance. The later essays turn more directly toward Los Angeles and Didion, complicating the mythology of female precarity rather than simply denouncing it. It is an unusually readable collision of feminist criticism, pop culture and personal essay, interested less in declaring the trope dead than in asking why we keep resurrecting it. 

William Morrow / HarperCollins, New York, 2018. First edition. Paperback. Light rubbing and edge wear to covers, with minor handling marks. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.