Murmur

Poetry. Cross-Genre."Wildly absorbing, MURMUR is a gorgeous genre-bender: detective novel, film noir and memoir (and autopsy of all three), tricked out with bloody mirrors, blue murder, mutable coffins, loopy interrogations and a dead bombshell's shoes. This is one fabulous book!"—Rikki Ducornet

"Laura Mullen floods the confines of the 'detective novel' with all possible events, all murderers and all murdered so that, at any point in the narrative, everything has happened and everyone has done it. MURMUR is a further-fiction of displacement and testimony that calls us to the task of deciding not only whether we would or would not do a thing but also whether we even know the difference between the two. A gripping exploration into the brutality of our time that you will not soon forget."—Renee Gladman

"MURMUR collects an astonishing array of sorties into language as a terra incognita occasioning the uncanny and always troubled confluence of the subject, the bodies it inhabits and the linguistic remainder. Mullen animates narrative at the level of its basic semantic pulse. You'll meet a talking corpse, a severed head, a heart drawn on an open palm and the gradual destruction of a face. Mullen is as much an expert in the comic and grotesque, as in the restless and anonymous. With a majestically controlled impatience she constructs a textual space both unnerving and familiar. These are splendid texts of the nameless ones (a 'messenger,' the 'caller,' the 'reader') who interrupt and witness the murmur of the linked deictic shadows of a recurring 'she' and 'he.' Never since Beckett has the unnamed been so chilling precisely because it is unnameable."—Steve McCaffery

"Laura Mullen's MURMUR finds the crime in the moments between actions, in language overheard, doubling back, in a style both unnerving and comforting; always midsentence we feel death never dying, 'real despite or because of the staging,' and in the background, Duras, Hitchcock—the passions of mundane horrors always ready for our pleasure, discovery. MURMUR stays the mind like an unforgettable dream."—Thalia Field