All These Bodies: An ending that refuses to commit mars a solid premise

Readers who are familiar with author Kendare Blake solely because of her (very good!) Three Dark Crowns fantasy series may be initially taken aback by her latest novel, a contemporary piece of horror fiction entitled All These Bodies that is partially based on a real-life true story.

Seventeen-year-old aspiring journalist Michael Jensen – and the rest of the small Minnesota town where he lives – have been both fascinated and horrified by a series of violent deaths. Known as the Bloodless Murders, at least 12 dead bodies have been discovered across the Midwest, all completely drained of blood. The police are at a loss, baffled by the absence of blood in the victims and from the crime scenes themselves.

But when his neighbors the Carlson family are brutally murdered in a similar fashion, there’s something new. A fifteen-year-old girl named Marie Catherine Hale is there, covered in blood at the scene of the crime, but without a scratch on her. As the public demand for answers – and someone to blame – grows, Marie refuses to talk to anyone except Michael about what happened or the person she claims is responsible for all the deaths.

Michael agrees, but rather than remaining an objective reporter throughout her retelling, he becomes something much more like Marie’s confessor as he listens to her increasingly disturbing and supernatural tale. Marie, for what it’s worth, insists that she is innocent of the Carlson family’s murders, but the person she claims is responsible, well. It seems impossible. Fantastical. A last-ditch desperate lie to save herself somehow. Is she? Well, the biggest problem with All These Bodies is that it has no interest in telling you.

Ambiguity in stories like this isn’t anything new – and there’s something to be said for allowing her readers to make up their own minds about how they feel regarding Marie and her story. There are certainly historical precedents for the way she’s treated by both the authorities and society at large – it’s not a new thing for women to not be believed, after all. But the ending of All These Bodies so firmly wants to have it both ways – humans are monsters! also real monsters might be monsters! – that it ends up essentially choosing nothing at all.

Part of the issue is that the story is entirely told from Micheal’s perspective, meaning that Marie’s story is ultimately filtered through us through him, and we only see her behavior, demeanor, and tone of voice through his eyes. And though he witnesses creepy and disturbing things happening around town, Michael’s a relatively reluctant believer in the things Marie is telling him. (Until he isn’t.)

So it’s hard to know where we, as readers, are meant to ground ourselves in the story. And, as a result, by the time we get to the end, we don’t know what to believe. It’s an ending that isn’t very satisfying, and one that casts a pall over the rest of the book, which in all fairness is really quite good! The pacing is propulsive and it’s full of the sort of creepy small-town true crime touches that make it hard to put down. Blake is as good a writer here as she is in her other fiction, and though you might find the ending a tad disappointing, the journey is still fairly riveting along the way.

All These Bodies is now available.