Book Review: You’d Look Better As A Ghost by Joanna Wallace

There’s no two ways about it: Claire is a serial killer. She tries to keep her victim list confined to those she deems worthy of killing, but when worthiness generally correlates to how much her victim has personally annoyed her, it’s not hard to see that she’s not being at all altruistic with her murders. 

At least she’s a careful killer, in the ordinary run of things. That changes after her beloved father dies. Unmoored by grief, the budding artist is further discombobulated when she discovers that she hasn’t been shortlisted for a prestigious art prize after all. This recognition of her talent had sustained her emotionally as she mourned her father, so she’s crushed when the person in charge of sending out notices of congratulations writes to her again, admitting that he’d mistakenly emailed the wrong Claire.

Hellbent on vengeance, she tracks down the careless email writer, one Lucas Kane, to the pub. Usually, she’d have a better plan than to get him drunk and lure him back to her place before cutting him up into bits, but her heightened state of aggravation demands immediate satisfaction. At least, she realizes, killing again has brought her out of her depressive funk and back to a sense of gory normalcy:

Loosening the restraints on his wrists, I stare deep into his eyes, so excited to see it. That beautiful dying flicker of hope. And that’s when I retighten the restraints and plunge the knife deeper. Not deep enough to end his life yet, just enough to extinguish that hope. Lucas screams and closes his eyes. Opens them immediately upon my command, and I smile, enjoying my favorite part of the process. The part when I know one of my victims is going to die soon. The part when I can anticipate every moment of their deaths. The part when I already see them as ghosts.

Unfortunately for Claire, Lucas wasn’t the only person to follow her home from the pub. Someone else was watching their little tryst, and is unafraid enough to try to blackmail Claire in the aftermath. This is about the last thing Claire needs, even as she attempts to salvage her art career while attending a weekly bereavement group that has her thinking uncomfortably about her own past. Killing Lucas made her feel better but opened up a whole new world of complications. What lengths will our antiheroine have to go to in order to find peace of mind once more?

You’d Look Better As A Ghost is a fascinating, often funny, sometimes gruesome look into the making and ongoing moves of a serial killer. Claire manages to be ghastly but also sympathetic as she attempts to engage with the world on its terms instead of just her own – she can’t kill <i>everybody</i> after all. Being a psychopath often makes normal human interactions feel unbearable for her, in a way that’s directly relatable even for those of us without homicidal impulses. When asked by a grieving relative to go out for a coffee, for example, she’s promised that their conversation will only take twenty minutes, which sets her off to ruminating over what that actually means:

Twenty minutes. That’s an interesting figure. Must be an ordinary person’s estimation of how long it takes to fathom the unfathomable. Seems a highly unrealistic estimation to me, especially factoring in all the unknowns. Where are we going to have this coffee? Are we going to walk there? Drive? Does the clock start ticking as soon as we head off? Or only after the first sip of coffee? And what happens once the twenty minutes are up? Can I leave straightaway regardless of how much coffee is drunk or do I have to wait until the mugs are empty?

The twists in this book are as well-crafted as the psychological insights, making this the perfect read for anyone who’s ever enjoyed Caroline Kepnes’ You series and thought how fun it would be if the protagonist were a woman instead. Claire isn’t as obsessed with romantic love as You’s Joe Goldberg, but she’s a compelling antiheroine in her own right, trying to grieve and make her own way in the world despite the people around her who are just begging, in her opinion, for her to kill them. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this novel wasn’t the start of a highly entertaining series too.