The Maris Review, vol 88

Maris Kreizman

20 Jan 2026 — 4 min read

The theme this week is cabins in the woods.

What I read this week

Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack

You have to understand that the early readers edition of this debut novel had a black cover with white writing that said SOMEBODY HAD TO DO IT. "It" is exactly what you think it is, the "it" when you check your phone early in the morning and hope to see the breaking news alert we've all been anticipating for so, so long, ever since 2016 (or before!). The premise alone was enough to move it to the top of my to-read list.

The murder victim in Murder Bimbo is Meat Neck, who is not exactly Donald Trump, but he is a MAGA-coded right-wing politician with a history of violence against women. His killer is a sex worker in her early 30s who refers to herself as Murder Bimbo. We meet Murder Bimbo at a cabin in the woods to which she's escaped after she's successfully carried out an assassination plot. It's there, or a version of there, where Murder Bimbo tells us three different versions of a similar story about how and why she pulled it off; the first two versions are told as a series of emails to two different recipients. The last is more straightforward. "I wish I could tell you an objective story," she tells the reader, but "we listen to every story while shuffling through a deck of pre-made narrative arcs in out minds."

Catherine Lacey's cover quote says that Murder Bimbo is "Gone Girl for the Luigi Mangione era" and I really did think about Luigi a lot while reading the novel. I remember when he was first apprehended and his social media accounts were still up and relatively unscathed and I went looking through his Goodreads. I was shocked to discover that he loved Ayn Rand and Steve-O and a variety of business grifters. I was doing the thing where I was looking for a neat little narrative about who Luigi was and what motivated him to murder. But looking for political cohesion in our increasingly splintered world is the stuff of mediocre true crime podcasts, not great fiction.

I won't say too much more, just that Murder Bimbo is smart and funny and fun, but it's not exactly the wish fulfillment novel you might be expecting. But that's okay! It's weirder and more nuanced. Murder Bimbo comes from the same imprint as The Safekeep, another novel that is better to go into cold than to hear too much about it beforehand.

Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno

Speaking of great marketing lines, Little, Brown calls this debut novel by memoirist Melissa Faliveno "a butch Black Swan." Okay!

Hemlock is the story of Sam, a magazine editor who leaves her Greenpoint apartment and her boyfriend and cat to go to desolate Northern Wisconsin all alone to try to fix up her parents' old cabin. That the family had named the cabin Hemlock is more than a little telling; Sam's mother had disappeared into the woods from there many years ago. Now Sam is hoping she can help her father sell the place and move on.

In many ways Hemlock is a classic psychological thriller, a novel in which the main character may be terrorized be serial killers and monsters who lurk in the woods, or the voices might be coming from inside her own head. Alcoholism has a particular way of making narrators become unreliable, and Sam, who had quit drinking before she came back to Wisconsin, is prone to blackouts and strange dreams and missing pieces of time when she's off the wagon. Her familial traumas resurface even as she finds herself conversing with a judgmental deer whom she's been feeding illegally.

All the while she does manual labor and gets stronger despite her drinking, she lets her body hair grow in, she makes a couple of friends, and she starts to feel just a little bit more like who she's meant to be. Hemlock becomes a really stylish, smart take on the horror of gender dysphoria, a werewolf story in which the terror only comes if the protagonist does not transform into something else at the end.

On Minneapolis

It's difficult not to feel helpless from elsewhere as we watch the federal government wage a war on the people of Minneapolis. Lots of area stores will participate in a workers' day of economic blackout this Friday in protest of ICE's presence and to honor the memory of the poet they murdered, Renee Good.

Here's a very small thing you can do to send a little love to Minneapolis bookstores in the meantime. Search by state on Bookshop.org to support a particular independent bookstore, and rather than choosing your favorite local shop this week to receive a profit share, pick one that's in Minneapolis. Some favorites include Magers & Quinn, Moon Palace Books, Comma, Strive, and Wild Rumpus.

Fuck ICE forever. <3