Gabino Iglesias Reviews Dead Eleven by Jimmy Juliano
Dead Eleven, Jimmy Juliano (Dutton 978-0-59347-192-0, $27.00, 448pp, hc) June 2023.
Jimmy Juliano’s Dead Eleven is one of the most impressive debuts of 2023. The narrative, which follows a woman’s disappearance on a strange island, has a unique approach that makes it read like a found-footage film. It also mixes a lot of creepy lore, a secretive community stuck in the past in a strange island, and something stalking people in the woods with great writing about grief, a mother’s desperate search to find answers to her dead son’s last message, and a man’s equally desperate search to find his sister.
After her young son’s death, Willow Stone finds two words scribbled on the floor of his room: Clifford Island. The words mean nothing to her. Her family has never been there. They haven’t even heard of the place. What did they mean to her son? Why were they so important that he would write them on the floor of his room? After some research, Willow learns Clifford Island is a tiny island off Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula…and not much more. The place doesn’t show up anywhere online. Grieving, alone after her husband suddenly left her, and obsessed with understanding the meaning of those words, Willow goes to Clifford Island and, wanting to stick around, finds a job there. Before long, Willow comes to understand that Clifford Island is strange in many ways, and that the locals are hiding a lot of secrets. Also, everyone dresses like it’s the ’90s, no one has a cell phone, all you can see on TV is the OJ Simpson car chase, and the small community seems very hermetic and reticent to interact with outsiders or pass time on the mainland.
While working in Clifford Island, Willow meets Lily Becker, a young basketball player who dreams of leaving the island and is tired of the local rules, evasiveness, and mythology. Lily confides in Willow, telling her about how she thinks the locals are weird. Unfortunately, Clifford Island’s residents want to keep their secrets hidden, and Lily is a threat to that.
Willow also had a brother, Harper. The two were somewhat distant, even after the death of Willow’s son, but after Willow vanishes after moving to Clifford Island, Harper travels there to look for her. Harper, another outsider asking questions, soon learns about the many dark secrets of Clifford Island, and just like Lily, he decides to expose what goes on on the tiny island to the rest of the world.
Three paragraphs to get the basics of each character might make Dead Eleven sound like a complex novel, and in some ways, it is – the island has a long history and a spooky mythology, and the three characters are well-developed. However, the novel is very easy to read, the chapters are short, and the pacing is great, all of which make the narrative go by really fast. Also, Juliano uses a few different things to keep the story going: Willow’s letters to her missing husband explaining everything she experiences, text conversations between Lily and her love interest on the mainland, chapters from Lily’s and Harper’s point of view, etc. The result is a novel that often reads like a found-footage horror movie.
Dead Eleven has an uncanny atmosphere, and Juliano builds the story well. The narrative is gripping, and the various points of view allow the author to build tensions in different ways while also slowly revealing the secrets of the island. For three-quarters of the novel, everything is great, but Juliano fumbles a little at the end, and the novel fizzles out instead of exploding at the end. That said, the ending isn’t awful, which means it shouldn’t keep readers from reading this, which is a remarkable debut and hopefully announces the arrival of a fresh new voice in horror.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the December and January 2023 issue of Locus.
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