[Book Review] Beyond the Pale Motel (2014)

Francesca Lia Block's books are always a mix of light and dark, magic and brutality. Best known for her Weetzie Bat young adult series, her work often illuminates both the grimness and glitter of Los Angeles. Her adult novel Beyond the Pale Motel doubles down on those themes as she tells the story of a woman in recovery whose search for love ends in horror. 

Catt and her best friend Bree both work as hair stylists at a salon called Head Hunters, and they work out at a gym called Body Farm. The names of places (and characters) in the book are carefully chosen. Catt's rocker husband is named Dash, and he leaves her almost immediately; Bree's young son is named Skylar, and he represents hope and possibility, like a wide-open sky.

Catt and Bree have both been sober for a long time, prompted by a friend who had died after injecting Barbicide, a grim detail that sets the tone for Beyond the Pale Motel. Although the women are maintaining their sobriety, their lives are not perfect. They're both searching for the right man, but they keep finding (and occasionally marrying) the wrong ones. They even have a somewhat supernatural way to define the men they meet:

"Vampires were elegant, refined, and sensual... Zombies were big and brawny, a little clumsy, but ravenous sexually. They wanted to come back to life and you could give them that, which was empowering. Goblins were the businessmen we never dated. Ghouls were trouble – junkies and alcoholics, the ones that trickled in and out of my meetings but couldn't stay sober. Manticores, with their three rows of proverbial teeth, could look like anything but would devour you whole. Woman-eaters." 

The real danger in the book comes from the fact that Catt doesn't love herself. She loves others, like Bree and Skylar, deeply and well, but she's never had love for herself. She was never quite able to overcome a childhood in which her parents allowed her to become sexualized way too young. Her vulnerability comes to the forefront after her husband leaves her, and her low self-esteem and need for love and approval lead her into harrowing situations with a variety of men who do not care about her. 

As Catt's self-worth is worn down by her experiences with the Vampires, Ghouls and Manticores, she and Bree must also deal with the fact that there is a serial killer stalking the women of Los Angeles. The murderer is amputating body parts from the women he kills, making the crime even more frightening. As Catt sees it, he's "harvesting lithe limbs of his victims."

Block's way of showing us Catt's downward spiral is both painfully visceral and beautiful. After one upsetting hookup, she leaves a hotel room: "The hall smelled of air coolant and fried food. The red-and-gold carpet scratched under my feet. Ghosts wept in the mirrors." These descriptions effectively put readers inside Catt's experience, which is terrifying and lonely more often than not. 

One of the hardest things to see in horror is a reliable narrator whom no one believes. While Catt doesn't always make the healthiest choices, there are forces at work throughout the book (revealed in the graphic and heartbreaking last few pages) pushing her further down the wrong path. She's even drugged at her own birthday party, and everyone – including her best friend Bree – assumes she's fallen off the wagon. As Beyond the Pale Motel descends to its horrifying climax, Catt is isolated more and more, and the serial killer appears to be getting closer to her. The new victims are women she knows. Living inside her lonely bungalow, Catt's often awakened by noises outside, as if someone is peering in at her or planning something far worse. 

As she swelters alone in the oppressive Hollywood heat, Catt can't stop obsessing over the killer on the loose – and how can she rest with a murderer in her backyard? She says, "My mind replayed scenes of dismemberment again and again as I lay in a small puddle of my own sweat. I dreamed of mountain lions and snakes and wounds that wouldn't stop bleeding. And heads. Decapitated heads." Despite what others think of her, Catt never loses her head – she just loses her heart much too easily. When she finally learns the identity of the serial killer, the chilling revelation challenges everything she and the reader have come to believe.

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