Notes on Surviving the Fire

December 1, 2024
Sarah is the black sheep of her university department. Poorer than most of her peers and traumatized after a sexual assault by one of her colleagues, she has exactly one friend in the world: Nathan. When Nathan dies under mysterious circumstances, Sarah takes it upon herself to investigate. Murphy conjures the smoldering beaches of California and the crumbling world of humanities academia with ease. She, like Sarah, is a Buddhologist with extensive university experience. That familiarity keeps her debut novel's humor sharp and bleak, bypassing easy jokes in favor of unsettling truths. The plot twists are riveting as Murphy carefully lays out her book's moral dilemma. An action-packed climax skews toward the outlandish, which some readers may find undercuts the story's more interesting focus on commonplace violence, particularly sexual violence. Either way, Murphy's emotional, riveting suspense novel is sure to stick with readers for a long time.

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December 15, 2024
At a Southern California college campus, rape and sudden death are on the rise. "If she's female, start between the legs. Dad taught me that, his hand on mine, the knife between us." This creepy childhood memory of field-dressing a kill is our introduction to Sarah, protagonist of Murphy's choppy debut: an uneasy mashup of a druggy campus novel and a feminist revenge thriller, with wildfires blazing and ash raining down in the background. Sarah is about to complete her graduate work in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Teresa; her best friend and party buddy is her classmate Nathan, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune who has taken a vow of celibacy. The UCST campus has a tunnel on whose walls the names of students who have died over the past few academic years are graffitied, continually updated and restored after each official whitewashing. Next to the names are notations: "miss you, love you" and sometimes "rapist." Just a few pages in, Sarah will have to add Nathan's name to the list, as she finds him dead in his bed with a needle in his arm. But it's the wrong arm and the wrong drug, so she suspects foul play. Maybe the student who violently raped her a few years ago, known only as Rapist? Maybe his sidekick, Flopsy, who mouths curses and spits at her whenever he gets the chance? There are many rapes and rapists in this novel, and the theme of rape culture is yoked to a wild horse of a plot that rockets from a visit with Nathan's ethereal, fabulously wealthy sister, to a data-hunting expedition in a Title IX office, to a job talk at an academic conference, to a bizarre twist near the end that seems like it could be from another book entirely. Fiery on many levels, Murphy's uneven debut nonetheless makes her an author to watch.

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December 9, 2024
Murphy debuts with a bold and complex thriller that tackles rape culture and academic bureaucracy with a pinch of Buddhist philosophy. After police dismiss the death of Sarah Commons’s best friend, Nathan, as an accident, Sarah decides to launch her own inquiry. The two were graduate students in a Southern California religious studies program, and Nathan became Sarah’s main supporter after she was raped by another man in their department. While investigating Nathan’s death, Sarah starts to wonder if his demise is linked with the many deaths documented in a memorial tunnel on campus, and begins to suspect her rapist might be involved. As she contemplates revenge, she draws on lessons from the religious texts she’s studying, as well as those she learned while hunting with her father as a child. Murphy traverses multiple genres over the course of Sarah’s investigation, dark academia, amateur detective fiction, revenge thriller, and social satire among them. Though the tonal shifts can induce whiplash, Murphy establishes a convincing sense of psychological realism while making salient points about the challenges women face in the aftermath of sexual violence. Readers seeking a tidy conclusion may be unsatisfied, but those in the mood for more challenging fare will be rewarded. Agent: Catherine Cho, Paper Literary. (Feb.)Correction: A previous version of this review mistakenly referred to protagonist Sarah Commons as Susan Commons.