"On the Savage Side" by Tiffany McDaniel

In On the Savage Side Tiffany McDaniel sets herself the challenging task of building a novel out of the gruesome and notorious Chillicothe Six murders of 2013-2014. The Chillicothe Six were women marginalized by the town and the town’s authorities, whose approach to the growing body count is a yawn and a shrug: they were either tricked or coerced or forced into drug addiction and prostitution, or their families simply bequeathed these conditions to them. This is a stunning, challenging work, a full flowering of a fine novelist’s powers and compassion.

The first-person narrator, a woman in her early twenties named Arcade Doggs, tells the story of herself and her twin sister Farren; they had the bad luck to be born to heroin addicts in a small town in Ohio. Farren frequently spoke in rhymes, and would declaim her verses while standing among the blossoming daffodils, so she came to be called Daffodil Poet, or Daffy for short. Arc and Daffy associate with other women of the street and after they befriend them, these women start to disappear and wash up dead on the shore of the river.

With unblinking honesty this book portrays the abuse and the ruined lives some women must endure. The fact that these crimes against women occur, and by whom they’re perpetrated, is met by vast indifference, as I have said. We have a clear object lesson here about the forgotten and ignored sex workers, many of whom are under the thumb of amoral men who simply enjoy being cruel.  

Part murder mystery, part psychological thriller, and part parable, this plaintive novel pulls us into the squalid and essentially hopeless world these women occupy. After an early, rather desolate stretch, the book begins to soar as Arc and Daffy try to track down who’s doing the killing. Predictably enough, the police make an assumption early on that the murders of the young women are committed by one of their own.

Rather than treat these real-life crimes in magazine pieces or podcasts, McDaniel boldly sets her compass in a more rewarding direction. More than simply producing a fictionalized account of a ghastly episode, she has injected elements of wonder, and mystery, and psychological depth. The surprising hyperbolic course the story follows  before it finishes, proves the author’s technical mastery, as if further proof were needed after Betty and The Summer that Melted Everything. If you savor technical mastery bolstered by an out-of-the-blue surprise at novel’s end, take up On the Savage Side.