Gretchen Felker-Martin's Reviews > Coup de Grâce

Full disclosure: I'm friends with the author. That said, anyone who knows me knows I'm not nice enough to say things I don't believe about a book I didn't love.

Coup de Grâce almost lost me at the start with its chirpy, acerbic narrative voice. Thank God I kept reading long enough to figure out what Ajram was doing, to watch her peel the rotting onion of a human personality succumbing to necrosis while still alive. As a lifelong lover of Brutalist architecture there's so much to savor here on an aesthetic level, with descriptions that feel like some unholy cross between House of Leaves (I'm sure people will compare the two books ad infinitum; all I'll say is that Ajram has no need of metafictional conceits) and the blurry, monolithic deathscapes of early console shooters, a labyrinth of alien, impersonal concrete that subsumes and denatures everything it touches, but it's in its depictions of the slow destruction of the artifice of personhood as a bulwark against chronic suicidality that Coup de Grâce really shines. This is something special, a stone-cold feel-bad son of a bitch of a book.