Literacy 2024: Book 1: Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

Book
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

Synopsis
A writer begrudgingly travels to a ski lodge for a reunion with his estranged family. When the body of an unidentified stranger is discovered on the slopes, seemingly dead of exposure, it starts a process of dredging up decades’ worth of family secrets.

Pros

The heavily metatextual style of the book — where the narrator acknowledges that he’s writing a detective story in which he plays both Holmes and Dr Watson — gives plenty of opportunities for flashbacks and re-contextualization, with tons of foreshadowing.

Maintains a light, almost-but-not-quite comedic tone even as it touches on some serious or even horrific subjects.

Repeatedly insists that it’s “playing fair” as a murder mystery, drawing attention to details that will be important later on.

The format of the book, along with its chapter breaks and section headings, gives it room to stretch out the intrigue, as you’re subconsciously waiting for the event or revelation that will make the section heading make sense.

Gave enough information that I was able to figure out the likely suspects, even though I wasn’t reading carefully enough to piece together any of the details.

It never occurred to me that Australia had areas with high enough elevation for ski lodges, so I learned something.

Cons

Especially at the beginning of the book, all of the self-awareness comes across as try-hard, with hyperlinks to stuff that happens in later chapters before we’ve fully had a chance to be invested in the story.

All of the artifice in the style makes the whole thing seem artificial. Revelations of past tragedies end up feeling weightless and too lurid to be believable.

Apart from the narrator, none of the characters feel like real people with real motivations; they act the way the story needs them to act in the moment. People bounce back from the shocking deaths of loved ones unbelievably quickly.

The book acknowledges the “people trapped in a remote location with a murderer” cliche as in And Then There Were None, but seems to be so worried about falling into a cliche that it loses everything that makes the format special. In particular, nobody seems to be all that worried by the fact that there’s a killer in their midst.

For as much as the book signals the details to pay attention to, it still ends up with a lengthy detective-explains-the-entire-mystery chapter that makes all kinds of deductive leaps that feel unearned.

If you go back through the story and think about the events as they would’ve played out in chronological order, many of the character motivations make no sense.

Verdict
Despite my list of cons, this was a very entertaining crime story. I think its biggest weakness is that the self-awareness overwhelms everything else, coming across as lampshading the weaknesses in the story instead of actually addressing them. But the format is also essential for elevating what is frankly an over-the-top and not-entirely-plausible backstory into something that’s completely engaging moment to moment.