Editorial Content for You Are Fatally Invited

YOU ARE FATALLY INVITED is a postmodern pastiche of the classic mystery genre. When you do something like this, you have to think about the age of your source material and what your audience is going to make of it. For example, if you were doing a postmodern pastiche of old plots of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” first you would need to come to the realization that nobody younger than Sabrina Carpenter has the slightest idea who or what “The Beverly Hillbillies” are. Even the antics of the Kardashians in that same community are old news by now.

What Ande Pliego is mostly working with is a novel that released in 1939. You’ll have to look up its original title, and the one that was published after that, but it’s now known as AND THEN THERE WERE NONE by Agatha Christie. The secondary source material is a board game originally called Cluedo, shortened to Clue on this side of the Atlantic, which came out in 1949. The point is that all of this stuff is very old indeed.

"Stylistically, the book shines. It’s a well-written novel, conscious of its history and cinematic in its vivid imagery."

I believe this was not just a deliberate choice on the author’s part, but a necessary one. Where else is she going to draw from? Dorothy Sayers? What this generation of readers knows about Sayers you could stuff into a very small hat. Rex Stout? G.K. Chesterton? Good luck with that. The current book-buying audience may have a passing interest in Christie, and they may have played Clue a few times. That’s a thin strand to build on, and it’s actually a wonder that Pliego does as much with it as she manages to do.

The single most creative aspect of Clue is its characters, who are represented in very evocative photographs. One feels that one has a good grasp of who Mr. Green and Professor Plum are just by looking at them, but they’re just two-dimensional figures. Similarly, Pliego has populated her tiny island off the coast of Maine with a set of characters who I can’t quite envision in the real world. She even reduces them to Clue cards at one point, with no ill effect.

Pliego often has her characters tell us that the whole exercise is about “tropes.” If all she is doing is showcasing her knowledge of those same tropes, then perhaps it doesn’t matter if her characters aren’t fully rounded. And if all she is doing is killing them off in order to create tableaux, then it really doesn’t matter. Even in Golden Age detective fiction, there isn’t that much attention paid to characterization, right?

That is true up to a point, but the star of Golden Age detective fiction was always the detective, who managed to uncover the sinister plots of the villain and foil them. YOU ARE FATALLY INVITED has a mysterious, shadowy, J.D. Salinger-crossed-with-late-stage-Stephen-King author at its center and a plucky Latina author-turned-party-coordinator as his hand-in-glove accomplice. Everyone else is a potential victim, but how interested is the reader supposed to be in potential victims?

Stylistically, the book shines. It’s a well-written novel, conscious of its history and cinematic in its vivid imagery. But without any meaningful characters, all Pliego manages to do is play hide-the-ball while letting her proposed victims twist in the wind. Still, it’s a fun enough game to play for a while. Just like Clue.