Kitty Corner: ‘A Body Like Mine’ isn’t your typical horror story

October is my favorite month for a slew of reasons — miniature pumpkins, sweater weather, my birthday — but Halloween is not one of them. As a big ol’ scaredy cat, I like to keep my distance from horror in any medium, be it books, movies or theme parks. So when I picked up Alexandra Kleeman’s “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine,” I did not expect to put it down with a growing sense of unease gnawing at my stomach.

At first blush, “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine” seems your standard postmodern Pynchonian novel. The protagonist, known only as A, lives with a roommate, B, and has a boyfriend, C. They live in an unnamed American city, on a quiet residential street dotted with manicured lawns and lined with oaks and maples. A works as a proofreader for a company that produces magazines and newsletters. To pass time, thick with summer’s blistering heat, A and B sit outside and lap up a panoply of tropical-colored popsicles.

But something’s not quite right. Upon closer inspection, the standard trappings that accompany white-collar suburbia, the placid cookie cutter houses and big box grocery stores and tedious pablum on TV reveal themselves, like stage props, to be fake and contrived, in service to some murky conspiracy where a shadow organization pulls the strings.

First, there’s Wally’s Supermarket. Wally’s operates under an unconventional organizing principle in that every few weeks the store layout rearranges itself and the items rotate positions. The employee uniform is an enormous foam head of Wally, the store’s teenage mascot, and if you approach it asking for help, they are not allowed to direct you to the milk; instead, they offer a form of generalized aid, in which you describe your “product circumstances” and they suggest alternatives vaguely tangential to what you seek.

The Wally’s shopping experience is designed to obscure, to baffle, so that bemused shoppers are forced to wander the aisles in hopes of stumbling upon what they are looking for, and in the meantime, grab an item or two that they weren’t. Wally’s customers average an impressive 22-percent increase in unforeseen purchases.  

On TV, the most popular show on air is a reality dating series called “That’s My Partner!” One member of a couple must jump through elaborate hoops to identify their significant other concealed in a lineup, both burdened with the knowledge that if the competing partner fails, they must contractually separate and impose a restraining order on each other. During breaks, ominous commercials: A woman peels her face off — over and over — until a beautiful, famous actress is revealed; a dove forces its way down a woman’s throat so she can be beautiful and radiant from the inside. The most frequent ones, however, are for Kandy Kakes, in which an emaciated Kandy Kat chases after the freewheeling, ever-elusive Kakes in a series of increasingly desperate scenarios reminiscent of the Trix rabbit.

And then weird shit starts happening. A witnesses the nice normal family across the street — a mom, a dad, a daughter who does ballet — suddenly abandon their house in broad daylight, all while draped in white bed sheets with cut-out eye holes, like they forgot Halloween was tomorrow. Fathers begin vanishing from their middle-class lives only to reappear months later, living the exact same life with a similar set of wife and kids and a curious case of amnesia, a phenomenon that newscasters dub Disappearing Dad Disorder. B cuts her hair and presents the lopped-off braid to A, who suspects that B, to whom she already bears an eerie resemblance, is trying to steal her identity. When A confides in C, C blithely gaslights her, his bland, reassuring demeanor and ability to rationalize the most irrational situations only heightening her disquietude.

I don’t want to spoil the book, but once Kleeman completes world-building and gets the ball rolling, A’s deteriorating mental state leads her on a wild goose chase involving Kandy Kakes, “That’s My Partner!” and a mysterious cult called the Church of the Conjoined Eater. Stories exploring suburbia as a vehicle for consumption, conformity and commodification are nothing new, but Kleeman imbues familiar territory with a sinister air, so that I have second thoughts about stepping into the local Ralphs. There may not be monsters or demons in “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine,” but rest assured, A’s world contains something far, far more foreboding.

Kitty Guo is a junior majoring in journalism and computational linguistics. She is also the special projects editor of the Daily Trojan. Her column, “Kitty Corner,” runs every other Wednesday.