Here we have the 3 covers of the novels Lauren Kelly has written. These are amazing 'mystery/suspense' novels that focus on female protagonists, usually young women struggling with personal issues, personality disorders and extreme traumas (familiar and social). These narrations, as the author has pointed out, are 'genre' novels that try to give shape to the mystery of our lives, considering that life is essentialy a mystery, a series of mysteries, and that we may never be able to solve any of them, but the plots of these novels are organized in all directions at once, as with mystery stories, and make use of differente strategies (flashbacks, concealed messages, codes) to catch the attention from the first page. At the same time they convey a lot of criticism to our society, art, hierarchic relations, etc.
At the beginning it reminded me of some of Patricia Highsmith's suspense novels, although Highsmith claimed that she prefered male characters (very rarely she used females as protagonists of her novels) because she considered them more energetic and active. So here we have a new perspective of the genre. These are fascinating novels of no more than 200 pages each.
ps. Lauren Kelly is a pseudonym of Joyce Carol Oates.
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