review: death valley
Title: Death Valley
Series: N/A
Author: Melissa Broder
Genres: Literary, Surrealism, Magical Realism
Publishing Date: 3 October 2023
Original Language: English
Pages: ~256
CW: Grief, Chronic illness, Medical content, Injury/Injury detail, Death of parent, Excrement, Addiction, Suicidal thoughts, Blood
My Rating: 4.5 / 5
Read if you’re looking for:
A surreal trip through the desert
A funny & relatable main character
A meditation on grief & depression
Dark humor
Conversations with a mystical cactus
Bisexual representation
Heat stroke vibes
“If I’m honest, I came to escape a feeling—an attempt that’s already going poorly, because unfortunately I’ve brought myself with me, and I see, as the last pink light creeps out to infinity, that I am still the kind of person who makes another person’s coma all about me.”
This book was so weird, in the best possible way. It is a strange surrealist journey through the desert that makes you feel as if you are hallucinating from dehydration. It’s the first book I’ve read from Melissa Broder, and I’ll definitely be picking up her other work.
We follow an unnamed, female protagonist who is a writer staying in a Best Western in the California desert, near Death Valley. She has travelled there from L.A., supposedly to work, but in reality it seems she is fleeing from the depression and pain of her father being in the hospital, near death, and her husband living with a long-term chronic disease. When the front desk clerk at the Best Western tells her of nice desert hike nearby, our protagonist decides to check it out. When she does, she encounters a Saguaro cactus, which is not supposed to be living that part of the country. The mystical succulent has a gash in its side which seems to be calling to the main character. She pushes her body inside the cactus, and enters a hallucinatory fever dream, with visions of her father and other memories from her life. On a second foray back to the cactus, she becomes lost in the desert, and the story becomes one of survival, with her suffering from heat stroke and dehydration, seeing many more visions, talking to rocks, and almost dying in the process.
“I am going to die out here. I might. I could. Die. All this time I should have been practicing for dying. What was I doing instead? Reading reviews for sweatpants.”
Broder’s writing is witty and darkly funny; I even found myself laughing out loud a few times. At the same time, Broder is able to eloquently and incisively portray the feelings of disconnection and ennui that come with depression and loss, as well as the inward-looking, and sometimes self-absorbed, behavior that can also come with mental illness. The story delves into grief, with the protagonist quite literally journeying through “Death Valley.” As I usually do, I found this mentally ill, and slightly unhinged, main character extremely relatable. We are in the head of the main character the entire book, so we get a good insight into her life and feelings, and she feels like a fleshed out character. I highly recommend this novel for people who enjoy surrealism, dark humor, hallucinatory journeys, and slightly unhinged female protagonists.
“If I saw no humor in my unraveling, I’d have been dead long ago.”