RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksEncompassing kinky murder, cruel neglect, misery porn, human sacrifice, and miracles, the stories in Lina Wolff’s Many People Die Like You investigate the bondage of identity, the rage of tangled relationships, and the uncompromising cloisters of community ... Wolff explores voyeurism, surveillance, and compliance, how needs and desires entwine beneath powerful gazes, how characters’ sufferings beckon, repel, or even demand complicity. Whether one breaks faith, commits adultery, or saves a soul, the human heart is insatiable, and society cares little for love ... Wolff’s beguiling, often hilarious, nightmares blend ambition, abuse, and giddy uncertainty into quicksilver quagmires of the quirky and quotidian that encompass seven literal deaths ... A proper theater of cruelty, weirdness, taboos, manipulation, and malice ... Many People Die Like You sounds a declaration and a challenge, the title coiling, uncoiling … many people you like die … you die like many people … many people like you die … Wolff’s fictive, raffish finesse, extruded through Saskia Vogel’s ace translation, creates an urge to revisit these haunted pages, to see the ball of serpentine stories shed their skins and reveal brighter colors, heightened sensations of surveillance and venomous complicity, and the puckish enjoyment of human entanglement.
