THE 22 MURDERS OF MADISON MAY

Someone is killing young Madison May—over and over and over again.

Though he’s endlessly inventive and entertaining, Barry isn’t exactly prolific, so it's a welcome surprise to see a new novel arriving so soon after Providence (2020), his diverting space opera. This book isn’t completely out of his wheelhouse, featuring as it does some unsurprising rips in the space-time continuum, but it’s a little more grounded than usual, closer to a clever riff on unwanted resurrection, à la the movie Happy Death Day. The titular Maddie is a real estate agent in Queens when we meet her, trying to follow her profession’s primal rules (“Teeth, Tits, Hair”) when she meets potential buyer Clayton Hors, who not only identifies as some kind of otherworldly outsider, but also declares, “You know, I love you, Madison. In every world. Even when you don’t love me back.” Oh, and then promptly murders her. The only person who thinks this case is wonky is political reporter Felicity Staples of the Daily News, whose situation gets even stranger when a guy named Hugo Garrelly—who looks exactly like Clayton Hors—gives her a strange metal egg right before pushing her into the path of a moving subway train. In subsequent lives, Maddie is an up-and-coming actress or a TV weather girl or a waitress or a student—all ending in her murder by someone who can effortlessly move between the parallel worlds where she exists. Felicity is understandably disoriented when she too starts experiencing these different dimensions, in which her life is just a little bit different every time but she always remembers who and what she was before. It’s all very noodle-bending, time-travel–y science fiction, but Barry is playing with a very specific set of tropes, as Maddie notices just prior to one of her many demises: “Oh, she thought. It’s a horror movie.”

A very clever, unpredictable little murder mystery with some bittersweet tones about the things we do for love.