A couple of weeks ago, I happened to glance at this post by @Wendelius from the 2018/19 thread.
It’s about The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Tipton. I was intrigued by the idea of the novel, so I read it. And… wow. This book is weird. At its heart, it’s just a murder mystery, with all the requisite drama, backstabbing, violence, disordered personalities, and twists. But it’s also a novel with an accretive protagonist. The same personality re-lives the same day over and over again, but in the body of a different person every time. And over the course of several re-doings, is able to start to piece together the outlines of the mystery and what is going on. And if that wasn’t weird enough, there’s some metafiction going on regarding why this is happening, the rules for it, and the other players.
I’d say the murder mystery part of the novel works pretty well. It takes place on a decrepit old Victorian manor estate, with a bevy of guests attending a macabre gathering. Evelyn Hardcastle is the scion of the family who owns the estate, and she will be murdered every loop at 11pm. The protag’s task is to figure out who murders her. He gets a full day in every new body from waking to midnight to gather clues and observe events. The mystery is appropriately clever: slickly tied up, with subtle clues dropped throughout so that an astute reader (not me) might figure who the murderer is before the protagonist.
And I really liked the accretive protagonist; indeed it’s one of my favorite meta-devices in video games: Varicella, The Outer Wilds, The Sexy Brutale, etc. That’s done very well here, with the protag of the story taking on the personalities and abilities of the various people he inhabits. And the writing is strong, with the occasional startlingly good metaphor leaping out at me.
I think the metafiction falls a little flat here though: there’s an enigmatic plague doctor who delivers cryptic advice to the protagonist and seems to know what’s going on, and there’s an evil footman who stalks the protagonist with a gleaming knife. The way that situation resolves and ties itself into the murder mystery is not particularly satisfying, but it’s also not all that distracting, and at least remains interesting up until the end. The surrealism of the metafiction is what makes the novel so strange.
This is a bit of a slow read, but I found it compelling and fun: similar in tone and style to Knives Out.