There’s no predicting where the narrator may veer next, no warning of when Burns might pivot from the consolation of humor to a tender observation on despair. Each time the homicidal John Doe enters the family kitchen and begins to ramble, his children brace for any number of possibilities. “It was a case of ‘Phew!’” the narrator says of the son trying to guess whether his father might kill one of them. “It was a case of ‘Whoosh!’ It was a case of a look on his face of sheer unadulterated trauma.”

The genius of Burns’s prose is how boldly it goes for broke, in sync with the breakdowns occurring within the minds of her characters. Her cascading descriptions of internal turmoil spiral the way the mind does, and she often adds some odd shift in pronouns for extra flourish. In one passage, Jotty Doe, an adult woman silently reeling from the incest she experienced as a child, questions why she can’t stop her habit of “self-rubbishing, the negating, the sabotaging, the breaking of your own heart with your thoughts.” The odd, sudden invocation of a “you” in the ending clause feels true to the unpredictable turns of a psyche in distress.

Burns connects this luminous insight to the arrival of Jotty’s sisters at her door, intent on getting Jotty to go on pretending, as they do, that there’s no such thing as incest among the Does. Jotty tries to convince herself that her sisters come with good will. “They are your sisters,” Jotty tells herself. “They would not accuse you.”

And yet that’s exactly what the Doe sisters do, warning Jotty to stop falling apart and to stay away from any meddling therapists or authorities. The sisters form a collective chorus, their voices explosively, tragically squashing in Jotty’s mind. Amid all the absurdity and wicked humor of this novel, Burns has created a complex character study in how violence, paranoia and sexual assault can become normalized in a family, and often remain so. It is a rare novelist who can approach the unspeakable with restorative humor, but Burns has a gift for dismantling and reconstructing things on her own quixotic terms, as she suggests with the perfectly chosen title for this book.