When you’re being lied to, can you tell? Is it truly possible to know the veracity of what someone else is saying beyond reasonable doubt? We live in a very strange time, in that a wide swath of humanity is connected instantaneously with one another via the internet, and this connection is being used time and time again to spread falsehoods, rumors, and outright lies. The term “fake news” is almost ubiquitous, and is often employed without the slightest sense of irony against actual truth because that truth doesn’t align with one’s chosen fiction. So how can we know that what we’re reading online is true?

It’s with these questions in mind that we delve into Andrew Wilmot’s debut novel, The Death Scene Artist.

M____ is the quintessential unreliable narrator. There is not a single instance in this novel when a reader is going to know with absolute certainty that M____ isn’t lying. And what a compelling liar they are! From the very first page, M____ draws you into these blog posts they’re writing in an attempt to make some semblance of sense of the last few years of their life. They aren’t just lying to us, though, but also to themselves. This self-deceit is what makes M____ such a compelling and realistic character in this bizarre, surreal novel. How many of us have lied to ourselves about the person we came to love, about being okay when we’re not, about the things that we ultimately shouldn’t lie to ourselves about but do anyway because the truth hurts something fierce? Wilmot, through this gloriously broken character, holds up a cracked mirror to his audience and demands they look because he knows they haven’t been.

It isn’t just an unreliable narrator that forces the audience to really grapple with the notion of truth, but the novel’s construction itself. It is set up as a series of blog posts at first, blog posts that are supposed to provide M____ with some amount of clarity on their relationship with D____, Hollywood’s most famous redshirt (he is literally only known for his ability to die on screen). Interspersed throughout these posts are also scripts written by M____, scripts that initially involve some of the films they have seen D____ appear in, scripts that imply M____ was acting opposite him in some of his death scenes. This structure creates a very large mediation gap, first between audience and blog posts: this blog doesn’t exist on our internet and is part of a novel, so therefore it isn’t true on one level; and second between audience and scripts: the scripts depict films that don’t exist, published as part of a blog that doesn’t exist, written by a character that can’t be trusted. Readers are pulled into a captivating narrative and then must struggle as they figure out what is true in a piece of fiction. Wilmot provides no easy answers, forcing readers into this struggle to enhance the story being told.

The biggest lie that readers confront in this brilliant piece of fiction is not M____’s unreliability as a narrator or the narrative structure itself, but the lie that propels most of the story and provides a lot of its surreal qualities: M____ kills women and skins them, fashioning what they call sleeves out of their flesh; D____ helps them in this pursuit, helping them fashion lives that can be put on and taken off at will because it’s something he has done for all of his career as a death scene artist. This doesn’t actually occur. M____ is not out there in the world skinning women and wearing other peoples’ faces, but they do believe that they are. M____, through their anorexia and other forms of starvation, clearly suffers from body dysmorphia, and this lie is a brilliant way of letting readers know what they think of themselves. They truly believe that they are a monster who would feel at home wearing someone else’s skin instead of their own; they truly believe that by starving themselves, they can fit better into these sleeves, into these other lives. It isn’t until the end, when the the truth of the lie is revealed, that readers can fully appreciate the dysfunction at the heart of M____’s and D____’s relationship. He wants these lies to be transient, while all they want is for somebody to finally see them as they are.

The Death Scene Artist is a book full of lies and half-truths, and pushes the boundaries of fiction in terms of what should be believed at a time when so many people have a hard time believing reality. It compels us audience to recognize that it is a work of fiction, that demands we not suspend our disbelief because disbelief is the best lens through which to view this narrative. M____’s therapist describes their relationship with D____ as a fiction, and our relationship with M____ and D____ and this insane cast of characters is also a fiction.

“But it still hurt like it was real.” M____ bemoans at that characterization. Their therapist’s response adequately describes the kind of soul-crushing agony this book conveys: the best stories always do.

Buy The Death Scene Artist (Wolsak & Wynn, 2018) here.









Author Details Jay C. Mims Contributor Jay C. Mims is a writer living and working in North Texas. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia College Chicago and a BS in Politics from Texas Woman’s University. His first novel, ‘Skin Eater,’ is available on Amazon and other online retailers, and his short fiction can be found at emptyshelves.wordpress.com. When not working on fiction, you can find him on the back of his motorcycle or lifting heavy things.

