Review: Bleed More, Bodymore by Ian Kirkpatrick
What begins as a missing persons mystery takes a turn for the darkly fantastical in the initial entry in the Bodymore series.
I came across BookTuber Ian Kirkpatrick (better known on YouTube as Kirkpattiecake) vlogging about some publishing controversy or another that had been broiling over the past year, and quickly became a fan of her channel. Or perhaps I should say half of her channel, as contentwise she seems an even split between commentary on various publishing biz scandals and Yakuza playthroughs and damn it, I’m a God Hand man ‘till I die. Still, if you’re in the market for a booktube channel that’s apolitical, funny and interesting, check her out. But can she write?
Well, Kirkpatrick is also the author of four novels, including Bleed More, which I happened to grab when it was on sale last year. It begins as a missing persons story turned personal, and takes the reader into the deadlier parts of Charm City and on to a darkly beautiful netherworld and back, all of it gradually unfolding like some weird police procedural whose dangerous allure keeps you on for the ride.
The Story
A missing body in Baltimore isn’t a story. Unless they’re a friend’s. Our story finds Joey, a twentysomething skateboarding tomboy employed by a local garage driving into Leakin Park (colloquially known as “Murder Park”, just as Baltimore is called “Bodymore”), where her friend Wayland’s Ford Taurus has broken down. While setting up for a tow, she discovers he’s not in his car, or anywhere around it, and his texts are going unanswered. With night having firmly fallen, eerie sounds coming from all around her and with the dark shadows of the surrounding trees harboring who knows what, she secures the car and gets back to the garage. However, her night’s about to get worse.
Looking over the car, the trunk is opened and a mutilated body is discovered that no one recognizes. The cops are stumped, and as Wayland’s disappearance continues to haunt her, she finds herself going into parts of Baltimore people just don’t go, looking for answers. During a daytime visit to the crumbling ruins of Fort Armitage, she’s attacked by some shadowy presence and finds herself waking up on the shores of the afterlife. Her stay is brief as she’s not actually dead, so she can’t hang around (more on that below), but it’s after this point things start taking a really weird turn. Because back in the land of the living, she notices ravens are now watching her everywhere she goes and she finally starts getting texts from Wayland again.
The same Wayland she swore she caught a glimpse of in the spirit realm.
The Characters
For the most part, the story’s cast centers around a working class group of folks, all of whom are a bit rough around the edges to one extent or another. Joey (Josephine) is a high school dropout who lives in a trailer park with her abusive drunkard father. She does everything to try to avoid him, yet also can’t help but take some modicum of care for him. She can trade verbal jabs with the rest of the guys at the garage, but has plenty of moments of vulnerability and even tenderness, especially while around her co-worker and love interest Jagger. As the story progresses, and her connection to life and reality stretch, warp and grow thin, one’s feelings rise and fall as she struggles to stay sane on her search to discover the truth.
Detective Stone Grant (immediately nicknamed “Rocky” by Joey) is the erstwhile detective investigating both the disappearance of Wayland Cross and the matter of the body in his recovered car. His is an antagonizing yet oddly stabilizing presence with Joey, who is naturally untrustworthy around police. He represents both a literal authority figure who is invested in trying to bring closure behind Cross’ disappearance while also often questioning Joey since she has a habit of winding up around dead bodies and troublemakers. Kirkpatrick does a wonderful job of casting doubt as to whether or not Joey, and by extension the reader, can trust him, but the moments of banter between them, which can range from joking to concern to predatory probing, makes for a particularly vibrant thread of tension in a tightly woven story overall.
Charon and Val are two figures who seek Joey out on the Other Side— and the first clue that Kirkpatrick’s at least a bit of a weeb. Charon is impeccably dressed in a luxurious fur-accented all-white suit with slicked back platinum white hair, Charon is decked out in all black with black eyes and perfectly messy black hair. Both are excruciatingly handsome; and their appearances could easily be at home in the pages of any manga. Charon is a reaper tasked with guiding souls to their final destination, with Val constant companion and loyal attack dog (uh, so to speak. Read the book, you’ll get it).
The World
Kirkpatrick’s worldbuilding is par excellence, in both the real and surreal. She brings the grim metropolis of Baltimore to forlorn, graffiti-covered life, from the foreboding trees lining the paths of Leakin Park at night offering sanctuary to all manner of predators, to the needle-strewn and flooded chambers of the ruins of Fort Armitage whose spray-paint covered walls both mock its foolish visitors and scream dire warnings to turn back. Every minute in the place is soaked with a sort of desperation, the feeling that the characters themselves don’t want to be there, and would take any chance they could to get out. And yet, Kirkpatrick nails why they stay. Joey, pondering why she doesn’t just walk out on her drunkard lay about of a father, frames it this way:
If I walked out, it would be my condemnation of him. I would be the reason he gave up and put a gun to his head and fed the blood-lusting mud of Bodymore. I don’t know what it is about this place that makes people desperate.
Desperate for a future.
Desperate for money.
Desperate for someone else.
It’s always everything we don’t have that’s going to solve that desperation.
If only we could get it.
Bleed More's land of the dead starts visitors in Cavae Mortem, a place dreamily similar to a town on Earth. It has streets with buildings and shops, a hotel and even a bar, The Bin, where all furnishings are made of bone. Like a dream, experiences there seem real, yet vague and ephemeral. Pleasant music plays, but is quickly forgotten. Lyrics fade from memory as soon as they’re spoken. Couples dance and whisper to one another, but walk along streets with oddly vacant eyes, as if only going through some numb routine, though they seem strangely happy. Taps flow with beer that never runs out and disappears into nothing if the glass is tipped. All around it, a dense purple fog obscures a dark, ominous and thickly wooded forest, the Caedis Sylvis, that begins whispering things into your mind if you venture too closely.
What gripped me about Cavae Mortem was how Kirkpatrick’s descriptions leave one with seemingly opposing feelings of both small-town wistfulness and discordant alien beauty. You know you’re not home, but it’s just familiar enough to keep you from losing your mind and after a little stay even starts feeling comfortable. In other parts of the realm, familiar-looking shades haunt the shores along he river Styx, whose waters are filled with the spirits of those tortured by regret. Trust me, if you ever find yourself traveling along Bleed More’s iteration of this fixture of ancient Greek myth, I don’t care who you think you see calling to you from the shores: stay in the boat.
Politics
None.
Content Warning
Occasional mild language comes from Joey and Jagger, but nothing excessive. There are brief flares of sensuality between the two, and moments of drunken harassment of Joey at the hands of her abusive father that include verbal abuse and at times brief but intense physical violence. Nightmare sequences that detail the trauma Joey’s struggling with are also depicted and not for the faint of heart, but are usually brief, and nothing that kept me from enjoying the rest of the book.
Who is it for?
Anyone looking for some refreshingly unique fiction— it’s a story that’s a study in contrasts. It brings the grimness of modern day Baltimore to life without venturing into morbidity. There’s drama and tragedy that doesn’t veer into misery porn. It starts out as a police procedural that surprises the reader with its sharp turn into the fantastic. While I felt that the character development was by and large on the thin side, the dialog was snappy and real enough to keep me more than interested and didn’t take me out of things; the reader still gets told what they need to know; Kirkpatrick keeps the story moving while still painting the still, slow moments in a lush, bruised palette.
Why buy it
Kirkpatrick did something few authors can do— surprise me. The book’s atmosphere and settings pull you in, with enough twists and hints at the next big reveal to keep one hooked along the way. And if you really want to get in the mood for this read, she even put together a soundtrack for it.