Identity opens as a missing-person mystery on the California coast and then keeps slipping its skin. Author A.J. Thibault begins with two teenage boys vanishing after a brutal confrontation on the beach, then widens the story to include Lakeland, a girl with blackouts and a disquieting sense of estrangement from her own life, and Detectives Esposito and Shangri-La, who investigate the town’s accumulating oddities. What follows is part murder investigation, part transformation tale, part meditation on gender, selfhood, and the unnerving possibility that the body may not be the final authority on who a person is.

I admired the book most when it refused to behave like a tidy procedural. It has the scaffolding of a thriller, but its real engine is yearning: Tommy’s anguish, Lakeland’s dissociation, Shangri-La’s precision, even the town’s uneasy performance of tolerance. I felt, while reading, that Thibault was less interested in merely solving a crime than in asking what happens when identity becomes porous, when desire, shame, memory, and metamorphosis begin to trade clothes in the dark. That ambition gives the novel an electric strangeness. The prose is almost fever-dreamed, but that volatility suits a story about people who are not stable in the ways the world demands.

Some scenes are blunt where they might have been sharper, and some thematic material is delivered with a hammer rather than a scalpel. But I never felt the novel was timid. It courts melodrama and occasionally earns it. More importantly, it has a genuine pulse of obsession running through it, and I would rather read a novel that overreaches than one that glides by on polish alone. Identity is messy, but it is a mess in the old Gothic sense, charged, moonlit, and full of psychic weather.

I would hand this book to readers of queer fiction, supernatural mystery, psychological thriller, metamorphosis horror, and dark coming-of-age stories, especially those who like their genre boundaries blurred rather than fenced. Readers who gravitate toward the uncanny earnestness of Alice Hoffman or the body-and-self unease found in some of Caitlín R. Kiernan’s work may find something here to savor, though Thibault is more raw than either. This feels best suited to adventurous readers willing to follow a strange book into stranger woods.

Pages: 430 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GLL6S61C