Laura Kasischke's Novels: Blood, Suspense, and Middle-Class Dread

In a review published in artpress in June 2007, Laurent Goumarre examines two novels by American author Laura Kasischke: "Rêves de garçons" (2006) and "À moi pour toujours" (2007). Both open with blood imagery—a red Mustang like a bright idea dipped in blood, and a scarf of blood lying in a snowy driveway. Goumarre argues that Kasischke's work announces immediate drama within middle-class suburbs, reminiscent of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet." Her writing creates a stylistic counter-novel that suspends narrative progression through dense sensory associations and metaphors. The novels feature first-person narratives of women at crisis points: a seventeen-year-old cheerleader at summer camp and a mother and English teacher whose life is upended by anonymous love letters leading to murder. Both women conceal the bodies of dead teenage boys—a car dumped in a lake, a corpse buried under a molehill. Goumarre traces this technique back to Kasischke's first novel, "A Suspicious River" (1996), where sexual drift and gang rape are delayed by constant comparisons. He notes a weakening gap between mental writing and story progression, linking the two heroines through their relationship to death and the sacrifice of young men, contextualizing this within American literature's lost boys (Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper) and the Iraq War.