BOOK REVIEW: Balancing on a Knife’s Edge

Humor and Horror in My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Perhaps a novel is only as effective as its tone. If this is the case, Oyinkan Braithwaite has written a smash success with My Sister, the Serial Killer. This is a novel I consumed, in one massive bite, within hours of finishing Another Brooklyn. Even now, I doubt I could have purposely chosen two starker styles. Braithwaite’s clinical prose seemed, at first, bare after Jacqueline Woodson’s poetics. That said, the longer I live, further I move, away from Braithwaite’s novel, the more I love it. Braithwaite knows exactly what the tone should be, and she is a master at staying true, through and through.

Haunting and hilarious—a feat! While reading, one may be tempted to believe it is too slow-moving. And, frankly it is. But, that excess of mundanity is also where the novel finds its greatest triumph. Who cares about what type of cleaning products Korede is using, by the third, fourth, fifth time she explains it? She does. If your sister was a murderer, if you were implicated in a handful of murders, you would care about cleaning products too. Maybe that’s all you should care about. Maybe that’s all you can care about. Here is the emotional heart, the humor, and the suspense of the novel—all in one.  

A chapter called “PHONE” occurs on page 196; the subsequent “#2: Peter” is on 197. The two-page spread is a masterclass in tension, release, incongruity, suspense, efficiency, and humor writing.

Page 196. PHONE. Korede narrates to us on her choice to binge-watch TV shows. She tries to check the blog of her sister’s latest victim, but the website has been taken down. Her phone rings and she is reluctant, but answers:

“It’s Ayoola.

My heart skips a beat.

‘Hello?’

‘Korede.’”

Page 197. #2: PETER. Ayoola tells Korede that she has killed her second boyfriend. Korede is shocked, confused. Ayoola cries.

“Please. Please. Help me.”

It isn’t until the following page, 198, in a chapter called “THEATER,” that we learn that Tade has not been killed. He says Ayoola tried to kill him, but in the struggle, she was stabbed in the side.

By seaming these chapters together, through time and back again, Braithewaite is able to make the small blank space between pages seem, at once, breathless and eternal.

There are several theories of humor. Most academics cling to one or another, but writers tend to oscillate between them. Dabbling. Braithwaite relies heavily, and very successfully, on Freud’s Relief Theory. It is simple, tension is built up to a boiling point. Then, when given the chance, explodes into—hopefully—laughter. It happens again and again in My Sister, the Serial Killer. Braithwaite is an absolute superstar at cliff-hanger-tag-outs as chapter endings that leave you out of breath, only to open the following chapter with something incongruous. She builds tension, through horror and emotional stakes, only to drop us into something sideways. This is a deft combination of Relief Theory and Incongruous Juxtaposition Theory. Kant is famous for building out this theory of humor from the Relief theory. They go hand in hand, and Braithwaite has mastered them both.

Between the chapters “PHONE” and “#2: PETER” I laughed out loud. Was it shock or relief? That I can’t say. But, I was oscillating between stress—trying, foolishly, to guess what may happen next—and being in awe of the skill this seemingly little moment shows. I still am.

Throughout the course of the novel Braithwaite plays with time. In our present, Korede (a well-respected nurse) is fuming because Ayoola, her sister, the serial killer—who has killed all of the boyfriends she’s ever had—is dating the handsome doctor, Tade. The story builds to the point where we, the readers, know—or at least think we do—that someone is going to get killed. Maybe Ayoola will kill Tade. Maybe Korede will snap and kill them both. But, someone is going to die, and we’ve been waiting for nearly 200 pages to find out who it will be.

By the time I turn the page to “PHONE,” I am emotionally brittle. I, like Korede, am swept up. 200 pages of “Will my friend get caught? She’s been through so much!” has left me raw and also open, to whatever may come. This is part of Braithwaite’s clear genius. I knew that the first murder these sisters committed and covered up, in tandem, was of their towering, abusive father. He was going to sell, sweet, pretty, Ayoola to a chief as a child bride. Even the rule followers reading the novel will be hard-pressed to blame the young girls for doing him in. And these sisters! They’ve been through hell, and now the effect is that they are permanently linked, and Ayoola is endlessly killing.

So, despite all this, the laughter came. I was lulled into a state of seemingly permanent tension. I was reminded, by Korede’s subtle, entirely everyday actions, that this could happen to anyone. Any respectable woman could be in this situation! So, when her phone rang, it was my phone ringing. It was my sister, the serial killer, calling. It was my heart skipping a beat. 

And then, when we cut back in time, I was absolutely wrecked! Of course. It is not me, it is a book. How easily I was dropped from the embrace of Korede’s mundanity. How quickly I have swept up again to the idea that this is a never-ending cycle. How masterfully I was delayed in my desire to know if my (not my) sister had killed again.

This novel, like all great ones, is many things at once. But to the greatest success it is both horrifying and hilarious. It is Jordan Peele-like in its blending of genres. It feels, at once, experimental, and comfortable. Frankly, it was an incredibly fun book to read. Fun, but never relaxing—Braithwaite saw to that with a masterful hand.