In her much-heralded debut, a voyeuristic coming-of-age mystery bristling with horror tropes, Dizz Tate evokes a Florida town poisoned by secrets and explores fickle allegiances in teenage lives.
Brutes recounts the disappearance of a TV preacher’s 14-year-old daughter, Sammy, through the watchful eyes of a Greek chorus of 13-year-old girls who form her unofficial fanclub. As the town searches for its lost “angel”, the girls trace the events leading to this moment: the complex dynamics between Sammy and school power couple Mia and Eddie, and their roles in recruiting for the Star Search dance classes, which exploit fame-hungry kids by dangling casting auditions and a ticket to Hollywood. When the girls discover the true cost of these coveted prizes, that knowledge will haunt them into adulthood.
The teenage storyline, told predominantly in the first person plural, is intercut with chapters told in the first person singular by each of the girls years later, revealing how the past retains its grip. As they navigate relationships and motherhood, they privately test their pain thresholds, holding flames to their bodies, walking on their toes or dousing themselves in boiling water.
Tate grew up in Orlando and now lives in the UK, and the sense of place in her novel is remarkable. Florida is presented as crawling with life, fetid with rot: lakes conceal radioactive waste, sinkholes yawn unexpectedly, roofs fly off in hurricanes. The girls live with their mothers – fathers are absent, either dead or unreliable – in apartment blocks overlooking a Stygian lake, allegedly home to a monster. From this vantage point, “like guardian angels” they spy on clandestine hookups in an abandoned show home. Across the water, a factory belches fumes and rollercoasters elicit screams from their passengers, who mostly don’t die. The whole landscape thrums with violence.
Tapping into the gothic revival spearheaded by authors such as Daisy Johnson and Mariana Enríquez, Tate plays with the horror film imagery our brains have learned to expect: coughed-up lake water forms a shiny black slug; Sammy seems poised to peel off her face like a mask; and in adulthood two of the narrators confront a nameless terror, “clear as a memory, the outline, dark and sticky, creeping closer”.
Where does allusion tip over into derivativeness? Faced with Tate’s referential hotchpotch, from The Virgin Suicides to The Florida Project and Stranger Things, readers might wonder if she’s crossed that line. I’d rebut the publisher’s claim that Brutes is “wildly original”. Still, no one could accuse it of being short on atmosphere, or indeed action, which keeps coming with increasingly frenzied incoherence.
It’s a shame because Tate has talent in spades. She moves deftly between narrative voices, conjures striking similes (“they fell all over each other like two tongues trying to tie up a cherry stem”), slyly observes social tensions and captures the agonies of youthful yearning. What feels bracingly true here is her unsentimental vision of girlhood as grubby, vicious and tribal, and her depiction of adolescent hierarchies and herd instincts. Burdened by innocence and invisibility, yet fearful of shedding them, the girls watch from the sidelines, worshipping older teenagers.
They hide their inner desires from their mothers, who name them “brutes” for their crueller pranks. But the two generations aren’t so different; where the women are waiting to be chosen by a man, their daughters are waiting to be chosen as exceptional – by boys, crushes, agents. Though the group loyalty may seem unbreachable, when one girl dares to leave the pack, she risks being exiled.
Brutes contains many high-calibre ingredients, not least Tate’s linguistic flair and acute visual sense, but they fail to coalesce into a successful whole. After a promising start, she tries to cram in too much, and a bewildering arsenal of horror cliches has the numbing effect of a line of trick-or-treaters leaping out at you, swathed in white sheets. Next time, less is more.
• Brutes by Dizz Tate is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
