In the darkly comic satire Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (Poor Deer; Chouette), a young woman harboring a repressed fascination with the macabre teeters between an outwardly perfect life and a craving for radical, violent change.
In 1974, the Patty Hearst story dominates the media and 19-year-old Celia Dent craves "revolutionary changes" in her own life. She tells herself that she is lucky to have her husband--whom she always calls "my Drew"--to look after her since her strict mother's death, despite his shoves and scolds, which she reasons "felt neutral, not violent." Working in the billing department for the phone company, she's in a position of power over the customers she can cut off ("ripping your lips," as they say) but is kept on a short leash by the male floor supervisors. One day a co-worker tells the lurid tale of how a woman further up the corporate ladder was murdered by a jealous husband mid-tryst. Thoughts of love and death begin to haunt Celia in a near-erotic obsession. She begins to imagine scenarios such as stabbing Drew through the ear with her mother's old nail file. She spontaneously stays in the city late after work to meet a regular caller to the billing line. Then she takes one risk too many, setting off unavoidable, violent consequences.
The first-person narration is bitingly clever, and Oshetsky vividly explores how a girl who was blamed since childhood for being wild can first seek steadiness with an abusive man and then grow to embrace her wildness. Celia makes for an immensely appealing noir antiheroine. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library