Tag Archives: noir fiction

The plot of Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything is deceptively simple.

Evie and Lizzie are two 13 year-old girls and best friends, coming of age in a nameless suburb in seventies Middle America. It’s an idyllic setting until the night Evie goes missing and nothing is ever the same.

Has she run away or was she taken? If she was taken was it a child killer or white slavers? The police have nothing to go on as rumours spread like wildfire.

What does Lizzie know? A hell of a lot more than she realises. If only she can piece it all together. All girls have secrets, but this one’s a real doozy that threatens to bring about, literally, the end of everything.

The End of Everything is new territory for Abbott. Her four previous novels, Die A Little, The Song Is You, Bury Me Deep and Queenpin, all of which I’ve read, are set earlier in the last century and give a hard-boiled but uniquely feminine take on the locations and character stereo types of classic noir.

They are all fantastic reads. Abbott’s bigger than Ben Hur in the US and she deserves to be here.

Her jump into the territory of suburban teen angst could have delivered a simple Virgin Suicides-type tale.… Read more