Dizz Tate’s debut novel, Brutes, opens with a disappearance: Sammy Liu-Lou, daughter of a famous televangelist and an enigmatic rebel with shaved hair. When her mother discovers her empty bed, one question echoes around this fictitious Florida town, “tickling” the surface of the lake that lies ominously undisturbed at its centre: “Where is she?”
Somewhat infuriatingly, Sammy is to remain a mystery, since this novel is not about her, but the gang of eighth-grade girls hunched behind binoculars at their bedroom windows, ogling her – and all other residents’ – every move. These are Tate’s “brutes”, who together make up the book’s sardonic yet vulnerably naive first-person plural narrator. Sammy’s vanishing is just one diversion in what reads like a literary house of mirrors, deliberately only scratching the surface of the dubious (and occasionally supernatural) carryings-on in this swampy, theme park-adjacent landscape. As a search party of evangelical groupies unfolds, the girls introduce us to a suspect cast of characters including Sammy’s cartoonishly villainous best friend, Mia who, alongside her mother and a man named Stone, recruit kids for their talent show Star Search.
