Compound Fracture (2024)
Quite a brutal and graphic book, but one I enjoyed. Miles Abernathy is a young trans, autistic man who lives in rural Virginia, and his family is part of a blood feud with the local sheriff. The blood feud is resolved violently, and the book does a good job capturing the graphic nature of what happens.
It feels like a nuanced, realistic depiction of being trans and autistic – it’s messy and confusing, not a neat list of personality traits or an explanation straight from Google. Not everybody handles it well, and not everybody understands immediately.
I like the depiction of relationships that get cut off abruptly – for example, Cooper and Miles will never get to properly reconcile, and we just have to imagine what might have been. Most friendships don’t end in such gory circumstances, but it happens all the same.
We had a good discussion of this at Ace Book Club; it’s not something I would have picked up spontaneously, but I’m glad I read it.
Plot summary
Miles Abernathy is a young trans man living in rural Virginia, where there’s a blood feud between his family and the sheriff.
He’s found photographs that the sheriff was involved in a car “accident” that led to the death of Cooper’s mother (Cooper being a friend of his), but he gets beaten up and hospitalised by a gang led by Noah, the sheriff’s son. When the sheriff visits him in hospital, he encourages Miles not to share the photos, lest he face retribution.
Miles is laid off from his dishwashing job at a local diner, and discovers that Eddie – one of Noah’s gang – is replacing him. The two argue, and Eddie falls backward and is killed when his head hits the ground. Miles calls Cooper to help him hide the body, and they dump Eddie down a mine shaft.
While this is happening, Miles is seeing the ghost of Saint Abernathy – a miner who held the sheriff hostage during a labour dispute a century prior, and who later turns out to be a trans man. (Which explains why Saint’s paperwork is so sketchy, and he appears seemingly out of nowhere.)
Cooper resolves to kill the rest of Noah’s gang; Miles is initially hesitant.
Later they go to kill Paul, but Cooper is initially unable to pull the trigger. Paul talks them round and Miles believes he’s being controlled by Noah just as much as them – but before he can let Paul go, Cooper shoots him and he dies in agony.
At a fourth of July event, Noah outs Miles to the entire community, hoping to separate him from his family – but they rally around when they realise it’s an attack on them. Meanwhile, Cooper and Miles are growing distant because Cooper still might be attracted to Miles as a woman (despite handling the coming out well), while Miles is growing close to Dallas, a non-binary friend who works at an anarchist bar and whose parents became estranged from Miles’s own due to sheriff altercations.
The family makes a plan to corner and kill Noah in the mine, but not before he kills and guts Cooper, leaving the remains on their doorstep. Cooper’s father is distraught, and encourages Miles to seek revenge.
Miles corners and kills Noah, but then the sheriff catches him emerging from the mine, and takes him to where Saint was executed to enact the same punishment – a railroad spike through the throat. However, before they can finish, Saint Abernathy distracts the sheriff, who then gets mauled by the Abernathy’s dog.
The locals close ranks and refuse to talk to outsiders about what happened to the sheriff, believing themselves to be better off without him. They discuss the path forward, and how they might build a more equitable town in the shadow of Trump’s America.