I’M SORRY IF I SCARED YOU (Mae Murray, 2024)

Every once in a while a debut novel comes along where you’re not only excited about how good it is, but you’re excited for the next one. Mae Murray’s I’M SORRY IF I SCARED YOU was that book for me.

(Note: I will be discussing plot details, but nothing that’s not in the book’s blurb. CN: rape, abuse, abortion, revenge)

I’M SORRY IF I SCARED YOU follows the story of Odette “Odie” Tucker, a young woman from Arkansas who returns home from college after a traumatic rape. The first chapter opens with Odie enduring the pain of an abortion pill. She makes a stop in a gas station bathroom and, out of an impulse that seems inexplicable at the time, fishes the aborted fetus out of the toilet and keeps it in a water bottle.

This is as good a time as any to talk about one of my favorite aspects of the book: it’s bizarre and disgusting, and turns an unflinching eye not only toward taboo subject matter, but also the grotesque and unpleasant details of both crawling horror and everyday life. Murray’s prose is fluid but lush with sensory detail, beautiful without being mawkishly sentimental, and ugly in a way that refuses to let you stay ironically detached. This sort of thing is horror catnip to me personally, so I was making the “sickos yes” face through most of this book.

“They stopped somewhere in northern Kentucky, rolling through a mostly empty town with all the hallmarks of a place left behind by technology, a place with abandoned factories hollowed out by time and the collapse of the short-lived titans of the industrial revolution. It was a town with a bank, a post office, a church, and a convenience store, one in which strangers were noticed, and it set Odie on edge.” — Mae Murray, I’M SORRY IF I SCARED YOU

Particularly evocative are the scenes of rural poverty and squalor, which resonate with me personally — I spent a lot of my teenage years living in abject poverty with my dad, and Murray’s writing deftly captures the feelings of helplessness, alienation, anger and resignation that come with living in the sticks and being broke. Odie’s stepmother is addicted to drugs and zoned out most of the time; her alcoholic father draws nary a sober breath through the entire book and ping-pongs between guilt-ridden blubbering and vague, directionless rage. For anyone who grew up in an abusive household, these scenes will seem familiar, and add to the book’s steadily escalating sense of unease.

“This is why she didn’t like to come home. She could not live in the present here. She could not see her feet in front of her or picture the next day or the next. Every moment pulled her deeper into the past, deeper into the land, and the more she struggled, the more she sank.” – Mae Murray, I’M SORRY IF I SCARED YOU

Fortunately, Odie has her best friend Dahlia (Dale), her friend and sometimes lover Dwayne, and her feckless but big-hearted brother Bubba to support her. Another strong point of I’M SORRY is how powerful and real the bonds between the character are: Odie and Dale love each other in the kind of fierce, rocky way that only really happens when you’re young, and when Odie calls Dwayne for help with a gruesome and extremely high-stakes mess that she’s made, Dwayne does it without hesitation.

In some ways, I’M SORRY is about the power of friendship and love, but not in a wholesome “my friends will pull me back from the edge” way. Instead, these friends leap off the edge together with a joyous battle cry, going on a voyage of bloody revenge and gruesome discovery. Oh, and, perhaps not surprisingly for a book about queer misfits, this book hates cops. One of my favorite bits of dialogue is “kill the cop in your mind,” and the cop in your mind isn’t the only cop that gets killed. If this were a star review, I’d add one just for that.

“You’re right, it’s too much. Too much for one person, Odie. This isn’t just drama, and it ain’t your fault. You were raped. You had an abortion. Your little brother was shot. Life’s never been easy for none of us, not a day in our lives. It’s been shit, and it’ll always be shit. All we’ve got is each other.” Dale paused. “Light me a cigarette, will you?” – Mae Murray, I’M SORRY IF I SCARED YOU

Now to mention the most memorable aspect of this book, which is its wild unpredictability. A lot of the reviews of I’M SORRY say “I never knew what was going to happen next,” and I agree. I read a lot about the book’s supposed weirdness and through the first half I kept wondering when it was really going to take off. Then it did, and I was blindsided by the scale of it despite knowing it was coming. I can’t get into details without major spoilers, but suffice it to say there’s a scene not long after the middle of the story that’s shockingly weird and memorable, especially because it comes out of fucking nowhere, and I’ll probably be thinking about it for a long time to come.

The weirdness that permeates the latter half of the book is much more prominent than this review lets on. I haven’t gone into it much because it’s impossible to do without giving away big chunks of the story, but it’s safe to say that Odie is not done with her “rescued” abortion, and nor is her abortion done with her. And also, as someone on Bluesky rightly pointed out, you will never look at cherry pie the same way again. This is an experience best gone into blind, if you’re up to it.

One of the things I loved most about I’M SORRY is how wonderfully untidy it is. I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s shoddy or ill-planned; quite the opposite. The characters are flawed, often in ways that aren’t directly lovable; their relationships are imperfect and sometimes troubled; nobody looks like a fashion model and everyone is kind of awkward. There are two sex scenes in this book that I really adore because frankly, one is wonderfully kinda disgusting and the other is terribly disgusting, and it feels so indulgent to see the subject matter handled with such fearless aplomb.

This should come as no surprise coming from the woman behind excellent THE BOOK OF QUEER SAINTS. Mae Murray’s anthologies have shown her to be a champion of untidy queer voices as an editor, and her work as a writer is just as authentic and provocative. Murray’s prose doesn’t just get its hands dirty: it holds the dirt up to your face and lets you inhale all the rich, loamy odors and see the wriggling worms inside, close enough to brush against your lips.

Anyway. It’s very good. I’m really looking forward to the next book from Murray. Highly recommended.

You can pick up a copy at Amazon (the publisher, Medusa Haus, doesn’t seem to have a working store right now).