Mayhem, Estelle Laure’s third book, is an earnest but muddled attempt to account for gender-based violence and provide a feminist response.
Mayhem Brayburn and her mother Roxy are on the run. They escaped Texas and Mayhem’s abusive stepfather to the one place Roxy has left, the one place she swore she’d never return to: Santa Maria, a little town on the California coast, where generations of Brayburn women have lived. Mayhem doesn’t understand why her mother left, and she definitely doesn’t understand why her aunt, a middle-aged hippy, inspires such awe and reverence in the town. She also doesn’t know why her aunt has adopted three kids who sleep all day and stay up all night, and who make sly comments about Mayhem’s heritage and then smile.
It makes use of a trope I find particularly irritating, the refusal to reveal. Secondary characters taunt Mayhem with their knowledge and then claim that she either can’t possibly understand, or that it’s not the right time, or that they’re protecting her. And Mayhem goes right along with it, even though it annoys her, too. She never demands answers with any conviction or looks particularly hard for them, which makes her a frustratingly passive protagonist.
When she finally finds some explanations, the book is more than half over and the urgency of the serial killer plotline has edged out all the other plotlines. This has the unfortunate effect of over-condensing the training montage and the various reveals. Which is a shame, because the magic is pretty interesting and the history of it even more so. But Mayhem trains in her powers for a single night and becomes better than everyone immediately, and then they start going after criminals and encounter absolutely no challenges and make zero mistakes. Not a lot of tension in that.
Actually, there’s not a lot of tension in the serial killer plotline as a whole. It’s simultaneously too sensational and uninteresting. Mayhem and her crew has no emotional connection to any of the kidnapped girls, and no connection to the killer. Their only motivating factor is their outrage and desire for justice, which is noble but never explicitly tied to their personal traumas. Sure, it’s implied, but they don’t really reflect on it all that much. Nor do they reflect on rape culture or sexism or gender generally. It could be any episode of any CSI/SVU/ETC procedural, except for the magic. (And we could argue that all cop shows at this point use magic, since they get lab results in like five minutes.)
There’s no compelling reason I can find for this book to use a serial killer as a plot device. It actually detracts from some of the points Laure is trying to make about the ubiquity of gendered violence: serial killers are rare. Moreover, their urges and motives are so extreme that they become foreign to us, other. We don’t have to examine ourselves and any internalised misogyny if the point of comparison is literally murdering and dismembering multiple human beings. Everyone condemns that. It’s too easy.
It’s also easy to root for our protagonists when they go after and take down that serial killer. We can’t dislike Mayhem for killing him in turn. But since the book also wants to grapple with the morality of vigilante justice, it feels like a cop-out, a watered down The Female of the Species (Mindy McGinnis) or Red Hood (Elana K. Arnold). A serial murderer gets to be a through-and-through villain, but a serial rapist is nice to his kid sister and suddenly Mayhem has to protect him? Where exactly are her lines, and what is she willing to do with her power? Even by the end it’s not entirely clear.
I think Mayhem is willing to kill if necessary, but wants to move forward hoping that reform is possible. That’s a nice hope, but she doesn’t make any attempts to ensure that it happens. She tries to protect both victims and perpetrators, but then leaves several criminals in a potentially deadly situation. And when that deadly situation resolves itself, she never follows up on where those criminals go or do next. She wants to protect Santa Maria but she doesn’t follow up on the whereabouts or fate of a serial rapist? I’m sorry, what?
This book wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It wants Mayhem to be an avatar of vengeance, but also a crime-fighting hero, and somehow also a staunch advocate of mercy over violence. She can be all those things, but not in the span of a month while dealing with all of her complex trauma and her new powers. The book didn’t give us room to be with her. There always had to be action, had to be more stuff. Laure didn’t seem to realise that Mayhem was always enough. Her situation was enough.
What Mayhem is at its core is a book about women escaping abuse, dealing with trauma, and hopefully healing and rebuilding. All the other plotlines are, I think, meant to elucidate that, but end up obscuring it. If this had just been about Mayhem, I think it would have been more potent. And if there were only Lyle menacing Mayhem and Roxy, we could have really felt the weight of their struggle all the more intensely.
Lyle is a far more effective antagonist than any generic serial killer. Scenes in which Mayhem deals with him, or her mother, or their horrible life in Texas are emotionally raw and profoundly affecting. They dig into the hard questions and the messy answers of abuse and power dynamics, and Laure is really able to stay with Mayhem as she works through her feelings and her flashbacks. Those portions of the book are really moving, and so absolutely necessary to depict in YA. I’m really sad that this book couldn’t, for whatever reason, just be about this and tried to be about everything. Like a kid in a toy store, it picked up cool-looking plots like “serial killer showdown,” and “murder mystery,” and “magic coming-of-age,” and “generational novel,” but then dropped them in favour of the next thing. Nothing felt fully developed.
It may be better to try to do too much than too little, and I certainly applaud Laure for trying. She wanted to explore a very complicated topic in as many ways as possible, and give voices and power to the disenfranchised. Unfortunately, she tried to cram about eight different stories into fewer than 300 pages and didn’t let them form a real gestalt. All eight of those stories had enormous potential, but only some of that potential paid off.
Mayhem is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of July 14th 2020.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
A YA feminist mash up inspired by The Lost Boys and The Craft.
It’s 1987 and unfortunately it’s not all Madonna and cherry lip balm. Mayhem Brayburn has always known there was something off about her and her mother, Roxy. Maybe it has to do with Roxy’s constant physical pain, or maybe with Mayhem’s own irresistible pull to water. Either way, she knows they aren’t like everyone else. But when May’s stepfather finally goes too far, Roxy and Mayhem flee to Santa Maria, California, the coastal beach town that holds the answers to all of Mayhem’s questions about who her mother is, her estranged family, and the mysteries of her own self. There she meets the kids who live with her aunt, and it opens the door to the magic that runs through the female lineage in her family, the very magic Mayhem is next in line to inherit and which will change her life for good. But when she gets wrapped up in the search for the man who has been kidnapping girls from the beach, her life takes another dangerous turn and she is forced to face the price of vigilante justice and to ask herself whether revenge is worth the cost.
From the acclaimed author of This Raging Light and But Then I Came Back, Estelle Laure offers a riveting and complex story with magical elements about a family of women contending with what appears to be an irreversible destiny, taking control and saying when enough is enough.
