It’s late evening in a small town in Texas. Three teenage girls are finishing their shift at a family-run ice cream store when two strange men appear. The girls are stripped and bound, the store is set alight, and the men vanish. The title of Scott Blackwood’s latest novel, See How Small, was originally intended for his debut, the acclaimed, true crime inspired We Agreed to Meet Just Here. Taken from a line in that slim volume, ‘see how small a thing it is that keeps us apart,’ the staying power of this title suggests Blackwood’s ongoing honing of themes relating to intimacy, loss and communal identity in his fiction. Especially concerned with the interconnectedness of traumatic memories, See How Small poses burning ethical questions about how we remember the dead, particularly when they are victims of a terrible crime. Why must we speak on their behalf? How does collective memory construct, and also obscure, the truth?

True-crime-inspired fiction navigates unique authorial challenges to do with who owns these stories, and also confronts narrative expectations where sexual and violent crimes against women are expected and even anticipated. Writers in this genre often respond to these challenges by unmooring the fiction from its predictable patterns, and one of the standout innovations of See How Small is its voicing of the dead victims through the first person plural. These dreamy scenes weave between the shifting perspectives of family, witnesses and suspects left reeling in the aftermath of atrocity. There are echoes of Alice Sebold in parts, a sense of magical unreality that sometimes punctures, and sometimes accentuates, the thudding banality of violence.

See How Small is a mercurial, fractured and haunting novel, an inventive illumination of tragedy that breaks through illusions of what keeps people apart.

Lucy Van is a freelance reviewer.