HEAR THE DEAD, tinnitus as haunting

HEAR THE DEAD
ANN DÁVILA CARDINAL
Sourcebooks Landmark (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$7.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From award-winning author Ann Dávila Cardinal comes an edgy, genre-bending thriller following a retired photographer who begins to hear the murders of women she knew in her punk youth, forcing her to reckon with the past she's desperate to forget.

One woman. A string of unsolved murders. Only she can hear the victims.

Elena Altieri never wanted to be famous, and certainly not at sixty-six years old. For over forty years she's been hiding from her New York City punk rock youth in the hills of Vermont, but now, the past is catching up with her in more ways than one. Not only is she losing her hearing, but the photographs she took of a recently deceased musician are going viral. Suddenly, she finds herself summoned back to the city for an exhibit celebrating her work and thrust into a world she'd hoped to keep locked away forever. A world where her best friend, Sin, is dead.

At the exhibit, Elena hears the screams of a woman ringing among the hum of her tinnitus, and she's sure something horrible has occurred. But since no one else can hear them, she convinces herself it's just her damaged ears playing tricks. She tries to put the event behind her, but when the auditory visions continue whenever she touches something of Sin's, she becomes convinced she's hearing her friend's murder. Desperate for answers, she has no choice but dig into the past, and what she'll uncover will not only force her to reckon with her own fractured memories, but might prove that Sin, and other innocent women from their youth, were the victims of an unspeakable crime that only she can solve. Old punks never die, and Elena's going to prove that.

Edgy, mysterious, and full of heart, Hear the Dead is at once an inventive and biting story following one aging woman desperate to solve crimes from her past, and a thought-provoking meditation on friendship, justice, and what it means to remember who we are.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Elena's not a lot younger than me; she lived in 1980s New York like me; she has tinnitus like me. I was primed to love her, to fall in love with her story. I didm't quite get all the way there. It was a slow climb up the story's mountain to the resolution, or as we in less sexually savvy times called the climax. Call it that in these pursey-mouthed prudey times and you'll get A Look from some "protect the children" overreactor.

Ahem.

Ann Dávila Cardinal uses the weird effects on what one can hear when afflicted with tinnitus to mysterious, spooky purposes for the first time in my long experience. Author Cardinal has Elena grow increasingly deaf from tinnitus by getting odd auditory hallucinations that relate, she thinks, to a hideously traumatic murder she...knows of...in her past.

I'm not being coy, there; the point of this entire story is the murder of lovely young Sin is not in Elena's memory as anything but a bald fact, unattached to details but imbued with dread and a sick discomfort buoying it up in the immense ocean of completely anonymized memories anyone over sixty knows full well. Now that the ringing in her ears is morphing into voices and a changing cast of them Elena is going to have to fish for facts among the sounds. Voices speak words. Voices have conversations. Voices resonate with the ringing of tinnitus, is the modulation into words or just...screaming? Is this Elena remembering Sin's death at last or is this Elena's guilt over...whatever happened, if she heard it is she surfacing something that could lead her to resolve Sin's long-ago murder?

Listen sharp.

From the floor I could shoot from an awesome angle. A guy’s face on the receiving end of a punch, blood and spit spraying out of this mouth. The growling expression of one of the bouncers as he pulled some kid right off his still-kicking feet. And my favorite shot of the night: tiny Josie Bluth, a powerful singer who Sin had worked with for a time, in her short plaid schoolgirl outfit and pigtails, hanging off the back of one of the goons who’d harassed me. I captured the exact moment when she bit off a piece of his ear.

A badass in her youth, a badass now: Elena listens intently to the screaming, with the intention of understanding what she is hearing. What a great way to use a very uncomfortable, isolating phenomenon. Elena was a big part of the "underground" scene of the 80s as a photographer, a visual chronicler of the times and places on the punk scene. How telling that she has no visual memory of the awful murder. She has blown-out ears ringing with voices, clamorous with screams, and her visual record of it...absent, gone, vanished, repressed. All of these? None of them? But decades of not knowing, of not consciously being able to assemble the reality into a picture, makes her photographers' eyes twitch.

There is a resolution. You get your answer.

What interested old-man me was Elena's clearly intense desire to make Sin's death right at last. She needs Sin to be in the explained column of Life's spreadsheet because, well, because Death is supposed to end, to finish, to stop. It was murder, as yet unsolved; Death does none of those things for the murdered, so Elena will now listen to her lovely friend's death until she hears the fact that is so terrible, so fearsome, that her photographer's eyes can't see it.

That's tough. That's badass.

That's love.

The astounding pounding that misogyny, that ableism, that crude powerplays wreaked havoc on Elena and her fellow women in that scene, that time, her Nuyorican culture were, I felt, overemphasized. Dramatic effect wears out, like opioid hits; at forst righteous anger burns, then punchdrunk disorientation, then numbness; Reality did all these things to all y'all but fiction has different rukes. I know Author Cardinal knows this. I can only think that she felt so strongly about this story that it *had*to*have all the blows, all the kicks, every cruelty from casual to calculated.

For this reader it stopped having the desired, needed, salutary effect.