The Murders of Molly Southbourne

by Tade Thompson

Overview

"A bold outpouring of flesh and crisis at once horrifying and familiar." —The New York Times

Winner of the 2018 Nommo Award for Best Novella

Every time she bleeds a murderer is born. Experience the horror of Tade Thompson's The Murders of Molly Southbourne. A finalist for the 2017 BSFA Award, the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award.

The rule is simple: don’t bleed.

For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she’s been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.

Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she’ll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765397133
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Series:	The Molly Southbourne Trilogy , #1
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	1,058,116
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

TADE THOMPSON lives and works in the south of England. His background is in medicine, psychiatry and social anthropology. His first novel Making Wolf won the Golden Tentacle Award at the 2016 Kitschies. His second novel Rosewater is a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award and is on the 2016 Locus Recommended Reading List, and his short story The Apologists has been shortlisted for a British Science Fiction Association award. He enjoys jazz, comics, and baking deformed bread.

Editorial Reviews

The most compelling aspects of the book are not just Thompson's dagger prose…but also the blunt paragraphs and truncated chapters through which he reveals Molly's reality. It has the effect of a slide show in Art History 101. In darkness, we are shown a series of close-ups: gnarled hand, decapitated head, a foot, some blood, fragments that make little sense until the final portrait is revealed. It's as unsettling as one of Francis Bacon's screaming popes, or the Lucian Freud painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping: a bold outpouring of flesh and crisis at once horrifying and familiar.

The New York Times Book Review - Marisha Pessl

08/14/2017
In Thompson’s chilling novella, Molly Southbourne has an unusual problem: when she bleeds, a copy of her is made, and it eventually turns murderous, forcing her to kill it. There are precautions she can take, and from the time she’s a little girl, growing up on a farm with her mother and father, she’s taught how to deal with her blood when it escapes her body. The rules are thus: “If you see a girl who looks like you, run and fight. Don’t bleed. If you bleed, blot, burn, and bleach. If you find a hole, find your parents.” The psychological implications of a child having to kill identical copies of herself (called mollys) is nightmarish, but otherwise Molly thrives, and eventually she heads out on her own. She attends college and attempts to use sex as a balm, hoping to find meaning in her existence. At a particularly grim point, she calls the rules “useless, an attenuation at best.” Thompson (Rosewater) ratchets up the body count, but this isn’t just gore for gore’s sake; there is a real aching sadness in Molly’s isolation, and when she discovers a possible explanation for her condition, it does nothing to assuage her hopelessness. This bloody exploration of identity and self in a changed world will stay with readers long after they finish the last page. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Murders of Molly Southbourne is so strange and well-written and well-conceived. I read it in one sitting and yet it follows me around wherever I go. I loved it." —Paul Tremblay, author of Disappearance at Devil's Rock

"A bold outpouring of flesh and crisis at once horrifying and familiar." —The New York Times

"Inventive, chilling, and professionally rendered." —Elizabeth Bear, author of Karen Memory

"This premise fleshes out the strangeness and the grace of the human condition as well as anything I've read." —Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels and Mapping the Interior

"Tade Thompson's writing is as inexorable as a march to the executioner's block, layered with cold dread and an exquisite understanding of body horror." —Cassandra Khaw, author of the Persons Non Grata series

"The Murders of Molly Southbourne is bloody, quiet, haunting, and sharp—a book worth savoring." —Max Gladstone, author of the Craft Sequence

"This bloody exploration of identity and self in a changed world will stay with readers long after they finish the last page." —Publishers Weekly

"A bloody, intriguing puzzle of a novella." —Kirkus

"An enormously vivid, enormously peculiar novel... compellingly written." —Locus

"Excellent, bloody, unsettling." —The Book Smugglers

"The Murders of Molly Southbourne reaches deep into the heart of existence and drags our fears into the sunlight. An excellent, terrifying read." —Fran Wilde, award-winning author of Updraft, Cloudbound, and Horizon

"Tade Thompson weaves a subtle, surreal tale of life, death, love and damnation around an absolutely unforgettable heroine. Molly will terrify you, even as she breaks your heart." —Stephanie Saulter, author of the (R)Evolution books

"By turns disturbing, fascinating and heartbreaking, and mesmerizing from first to last." —Simon Bestwick, author of the Black Road series and The Feast Of All Souls

“Viciously real. Chillingly absurd. There's a visceral, bloody logic to Tade Thompson’s tale of self murder.” —Jon Courtenay Grimwood, author of The Fallen Blade

"A story to make your skin crawl and your veins feel full of dark secrets." —Sophia McDougall, author of the Romanitas trilogy, Mars Evacuees and Space Hostages

“A darkly compelling, offbeat tale punctuated by memorable characters and an endlessly fascinating mystery. The dark imagination of Tade Thompson is a wondrous thing to behold.” —Maurice Broaddus, author of Buffalo Soldier

“A novella that showcases the emotional depth of this writer, Tade Thompson’s The Murders of Molly Southbourne is utterly compelling, dark and disturbing.” —Kaaron Warren, author of Slights

From the Publisher

★ 09/15/2017
Since childhood, Molly Southbourne has known she was different, with her parents setting a specific rule that she must never bleed. For when she bleeds, another identical molly is born to kill her. Molly has watched herself die many times, both at her parents' hands and at her own. She has learned how to survive her many selves, developing skills that would shame serial murderers and prevent her from living a normal life. No matter how much care she takes, Molly will bleed, and the other versions of herself will eventually find her. While she's accepted the specter of death chasing her, she wonders if there is any way to change her fate? VERDICT Horror fans will love Thompson's (Making Wolf; Rosewater) sordid, dark, and coldly logical tale.—KC

Library Journal