Trigger Warning: Mentions of Suicide Your 3 am creepy pasta binge really has nothing on this book, so close that damn YouTube tab and listen. I am not saying that all creepy pastas are trash (kind of) as they have some good themes occasionally - unreliable narrators, the illumination of the creepy in the mundane, putting obscurity in a matter of fact way – but, Eugenides does it better, hell he’s the blue print. Published in 1993 this book melds my three favourite things together: the creepy, the tragic and the beautiful. Eugenides’ title ‘The Virgin Suicides’ is not a futile attempt at some ‘I’m artistic and misunderstood’ metaphor about the loss of childish innocence, rather it’s quite literally a synopsis of the novel itself. The Virgin Suicides starts with the tragic death of the five Lisbon sisters who,
Words by Sienna Sulicich
in succession, take their own lives much to the surprise of the town. I use the word ‘surprise’ here very lightly, as even the paramedics seem chronically indifferent to the occurrence, having hauled the youngest child from the bathtub a few months prior. Our narrator, although feverishly curious, describes the girl’s deaths almost as if they were a predestined mystery, a tragic but necessary addition to the mythology of their tiny neighbourhood. The narrator is just a sketch to the reader, and with no name or validity to back him up, there’s an underlying sense of unreliability and unknowing (which is perfect to me, we all hate a likeable and obnoxiously moral narrator). He’s kind of a creep though, like most teenage boys with too many hormones and too much spare time. Yet his creepiness is
the virgin suicides by jeffrey eugenides
32
