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Gunk Baby (Jamie Marina Lau, Hachette)

Leen has opened up a massage and ear cleaning studio in the suburban wastelands of Par Mars. Her shop is housed in the second-best shopping mall in the district—Topic Heights. The story is dreamlike, almost feverish from the outset. By the time we meet her, Leen is already somewhat of a passenger in her own life—she sleeps on a trundle bed in the living room of a friend who survives off lottery money. She hasn’t settled on a name for her store. So, when a somewhat repulsive yet confident acquaintance demands that she start driving him to a mysterious series of meetings, she goes along with it. Gunk Baby is author Jamie Marina Lau’s second novel and it is confident, assured and excitingly unique, exploring the idea of consumerism, of the risk of prioritising things over people, by never taking the expected stance. The story takes surreal, dark and sometimes violent turns as Leen is slowly consumed by not just the mall, but by a group that purports to be fighting against all the things the mall stands for. While the ideas are firmly drawn from the real world, Lau deftly uses the dreamy yet tense atmosphere she has created to underscore the horror of the everyday. Readers who enjoyed Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World or Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police will find much to appreciate in Gunk Baby.

Elizabeth Flux is a freelance writer and editor.

 

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