The 22 Murders of Madison May by Max Berry
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2021)
Reviewed by John Dodd
How do you kill the same person 22 times?
Usually with a knife it seems…
This starts with a reporter covering the death of an actress at the hands of an obsessive fan, a case that seems unremarkable, until a chance encounter with someone from another universe gives them the power to move between universes. But the first they know of this is when one day they come home and they find out that the person they live with is the same person, but they’re not the same person.
Others who do monitor the different universes make contact, and from there it’s established that this does happen, but there aren’t mechanisms in place to stop the movement from universe to universe. When Felicity, our heroine, finds out what’s happening, she’s new to everything, and she hasn’t developed the same lack of empathy demonstrated by most of those who know the truth. So begins a game of cat and mouse, not just one killer with one target, one killer with many targets.
They just all happen to be the same woman.
Thus, we have the interesting idea of how one obsessive has decided to kill all the different versions of the same person, constantly looking for the one that will accept them. It’s a dark concept, especially when you consider that this person isn’t just satisfied with the death of the person that rejected them, this person believes that there’ll be a version of this person out there that will accept them.
It's not a spoiler to say that there’s a multiverse type of concept here, but the story isn’t about the multiverse and the myriad of different possibilities, it’s about one person, and what would happen if someone who wasn’t well suited to handling the power of being able to shift between different universes, was given it.
What I liked in particular about this was that it came at the story from the perspective of someone who wasn’t familiar with the nature of multiverses, rather than the idea that there were people policing what was going on. In this story, movement between universes is carried out by means of a token, which seems a very random and strange way to allow said movement, rife to abuse if the wrong person gets hold of one of those tokens.
Which of course they do.
This was a good case study in the psychology of what would happen if someone with the mindset of wanting to own someone was allowed to continue trying to search for that person, even after killing them. What would happen if they found the person who would accept them, would they themselves be able to accept that they had found the person, or would the very nature of the behaviour that had caused them to do what they did before, have them repeat history yet again.
There’s a lot of talk of multiverses at the moment, particularly with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and all the things that go on therein, so it’s refreshing to see something done at the ground level, not from the level where gods and monsters play endless battles across infinite battle zones.
And the ending was very well done indeed.
Overall, the book explores the concepts of different worlds with the same people well, with slight and subtle differences, without getting bogged down with the possibility of what if, because there isn’t a what if, there’s only what is, just in different times and different spaces, and it’s refreshing to see that notion taken and made concrete. It took a while to get started, but when it does get going, there’s sufficient twists and turns to hold the interest, and it’s never entirely clear how things will end up, even to the last page.
Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.