In ‘Dead in Long Beach, California,’ Grief Gives Way to Disastrous Decisions

Imagine going through the seven stages of grief in seven days. That monumentally disorienting premise is the framework for Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California. The novel centers on Coral Brown, a Black lesbian sci-fi writer, who walks into her brother Jay’s apartment in Long Beach and discovers he has died by suicide. The whole story takes place within the week she finds his body, one Friday to the next. Amidst chapters titled after days of the week, memory, grief, denial and time bleed into each other.

Blackburn is an associate professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno, and the founder and president of Live, Write, a nonprofit that offers free creative writing workshops to communities of color. She has previously published two short story collections. The most recent, How to Wrestle a Girl, was a 2022 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Reviewers praised the collection for its playfully inventive structure; in it Blackburn alternates between first and third person, uses her background as a flash fiction writer to pack big feelings and stories into small words counts, and blunts tragedy with farce. Echoes of these writing flourishes can be found in her latest offering.

“Californians walked like they were underwater,” Blackburn writes in Dead in Long Beach, “slow, with all the time in the universe.” This warped temporal reality is compounded in Compton, where she notes “even time moved like water … a thing to drown in, a thing necessary for life.”

Like Blackburn, whose hometown is Compton, Coral is a South Los Angeles native. In suffusing the book with Coral’s memories — tender, bitter, formative — Blackburn effectively turns it into a love letter to the region. In the ’90s when Coral was young, the city was “a mecca, an Eden, a place to dream, honor; to buy liquor, doughnuts, fried chicken and greens; a place to loathe and protect.” Coral came of age in this place. She was familiar with its music and violence — a regularity she regarded as “white noise.” Still, death is not something you can prepare for.

“Death IRL is an ice bath from the inside out,” the narrator reflects. Blackburn’s writing is similarly bracing. The book’s format is experimental and hard to pin down — the label “a novel” is in winking quotes on its cover. We meet the narrator in the opening sentence as a mysterious and nameless ‘we’ announces, “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.”

This voice can alternately be interpreted as a representative of Coral’s split self (her grief has detached her from reality) or as the characters from her popular dystopian novel, Wildfire, who speak in a similarly omniscient tone. In Wildfire, the world has ended and the librarians (as they call themselves) have categorized all of humanity — including, but not limited to, helium, turkey bacon, motherhood and Velcro. “All of humanity is our firstborn, and each moment is a precious memory to be stored away,” they explain in the prologue of Coral’s book. “We are learning what precious is and what time is and how it attacks and soothes all at once and can leave without a trace.” The chapters of Wildfire mingled with the main text of Dead in Long Beach indicate the way grief is fracturing Coral’s mind.

You expect to deal with sadness after a loss. What you don’t expect after someone you love dies is the paperwork. Soon after finding his body Coral is faced with Jay’s paperwork: hospital bills, insurance papers. But we don’t linger on these details for long. They are mentioned more so to paint a picture of Coral’s growing mental load. She has already lost both of her parents and now her only brother, who was in his 40s, lived alone and didn’t keep his phone locked. The latter fact, while primarily evidence of his carelessness, also serves as an inciting incident for the book.

As the EMTs remove his body from the apartment, Jay’s phone pings and Coral sees a text from his young adult daughter asking to reschedule dinner plans. She has not yet been informed of her father’s passing. Rather than tell her, rather than acquiesce to truth and linear time, Coral decides to attempt the impossible — to hit pause on a traumatic moment while she is still in it. She makes a spur of the moment, erratic and ultimately doomed choice to respond to her niece and the admittedly few contacts in Jay’s phone as her late brother.

“We worship the ghosts of history, marvel at desiccated tombs, and play in their dust,” the omniscient ‘we’ shares. The dust kicked up by Jay’s death is fine and voluminous, enough to form a fog that clouds Coral’s vision and judgment. She is not so much playing in it as she is desperately grasping at it. She spends her week tucking herself away in memories while attempting to maintain the order of her life: going on dates, fulfilling professional obligations, texting strangers in the voice of her deceased brother.

The narrator, who has studied all human interaction and relationships and has indexed them as a way of understanding, explains Coral’s behavior with the help of dedicated ‘clinics’ into which memories and behaviors are compartmentalized. One of these is the Clinic for Excavating Repressed Memories in Search of Solutions to Current Crises. Another is the Clinic for Outrageous Disguises that Cloak All Existence of Frailty.

“In the Clinic for Telling Lies to Avoid Pending Death,” we learn, “there is a unit on living in good memories to dissociate from reality, like when we recall being fourteen in the front seat of our father’s Cadillac de Ville on the way to the Hollywood racetrack with our brother in the front seat … We were happy. We were safe. The sky was blue and we would never be there again.” In memories like these, Coral can both avoid and make sense of the present. The reader knows, however, that the comfort found in avoidance has a time limit; the book crescendos as this building tension is loosed.

Dead in Long Beach, California is the work of a gifted writer who understands love bonds, family, death and inevitability, but also has a sense of humor about all of the above. Blackburn’s novel presents grief as memory puzzle, grief as creative license, grief as fuel for delusion and awakening.

‘Dead in Long Beach, California’ is out from MCD Books on Jan. 23, 2024.