Built for Speed

By Peter Handel
Killer Potential (Morrow), a striking debut novel by Hannah Deitch, is at once a blistering satire of contemporary society and a road-trip story, with two very different young women protagonists. Set initially in the lush upper-crust environs of Los Angeles, the action bleeds (sometimes literally) across the country.

Evie Gordon, our narrator here, is a 29-year-old disaffected former star student who now cobbles together a living as an SAT tutor of bored rich girls who couldn’t care less about academic advancement. She arrives one day at the home of one of her regulars, Serena Victor, whose father, Peter, is a man with a secret and whose mom, Dinah, was once an actress.

The house is unnaturally quiet. As Evie walks through looking for Serena, she begins to hear various noises—a running faucet, a thump. “I went back to the main hallway,” says Evie. “Sunlight begged to enter, dripped beneath a crack of shutters, scattering coins of light on the scarred hardwoods.”

She wanders further, out into the backyard. Along with a pool and vegetable garden, “there were Lovecraftian cacti and succulents, with thick spiked tongues furred with spiderwebs. Smooth plant flesh in alien colors, purples and mints and tangerines. Rows and rows of teeth.” Evie’s sense of foreboding increases, and soon—sure enough—she finds Peter in the koi pond, dead, and nearby, ditto for Dinah, whose pretty face has been erased by a large rock.

She goes back to the house and hears a faint cry of “help me.” In a room secreted beneath a staircase, she discovers a woman tied up, looking “like a boy in a seventies punk band, living off heroin and cigarettes and whatever she could scrummage out of dumpsters. She wore black combat boots, black jeans so thin they clung to her matchstick legs like tissue paper. … Her chest, which was flat as a boy’s, heaved with effort. She didn’t move.”

Evie frees this mystery woman, but as they are preparing to flee, teenaged Serena shows up, melts down at the gory scene, and calls 911. Evie seeks to calm her, but when she tries to take away Serena’s phone, the girl whacks her upside the head with a heavy lamp. Evie defends herself, throwing a vase at Serena’s head. It connects. Evie assumes she’s killed her, and as she and the woman from under the stairs scamper—afraid they’ll be accused of three murders—Serena’s boyfriend, Lukas, arrives at the house. The pair make their getaway in Evie’s car, while he’s distracted with Serena’s body.

Before long, questions abound: who is the previously captive woman? Why and how was she there in the first place? What is her connection to the Victor family? Unfortunately for the reader, the answers are a long way off. Too long, because when a couple of strangers set off on the run together, the reader can’t help but wonder, what is this character’s backstory, and why doesn’t Evie just ask her? Wonder we do—for almost the entire book.

Killer Potential embraces all of the pop-culture tropes Los Angeles has to offer—there are references to Leo, Kim, Paris, Keanu, and one extraneous product after another. But author Deitch has a facile approach to the culture that goes creatively way past such intentionally banal, superficial exposition. For instance, as Evie is recounting to the reader her inability to find meaningful work post-academia, she bolsters herself with genuine insight into life today:

I looked. I kept looking for two years. There were still possibilities. There are always possibilities. The rags-to-riches fantasy is so deeply engraved into the American consciousness that it’s cellular, the invisible strand in the helix of our DNA. A doe-eyed chimney sweep works hard and catches the eye of a Wall Street Prince Charming. Bootstrapping stories have kept the capitalists’ dicks hard since the Gilded Age.

Evie’s fellow fugitive remains close-lipped as the two begin an uneasy partnership based on mutual need. They are fleeing capture, but don’t know where they’re going. News reports emerge as the bodies are found at the Victor home, and Lukas is blabbing about what he saw. The elder Victors are past tense, but is Serena actually dead? Evie sure as hell hopes not—her account of the episode could go a long way toward vindication for both Evie and the woman she rescued.

It isn’t until they hole up to rest in a cheap motel, that the other woman offers her name, Jae, and the ice floe between the two begins to dissipate. Evie and Jae begin crisscrossing the country, eventually hatching a plan to reach Canada via Washington state. Background on each of them is shared. Predictably, things between the two get very cozy, as they steal cars and a boat, and hide out in a deserted furniture store, all the while staying some steps ahead of a nationwide manhunt and sensational stories painting them as vicious killers, or “Manson-like.”

They have some close calls, though, including a confrontation with some idiotic men who can expose them, and who are dispatched with knife-play. A Glock pistol the women have snagged along their journey also comes in handy.

Deitch, who earned a Master’s in English from the University of California, Irvine, studying contemporary pop culture and Marxist theory, clearly revels in taking (often hilarious) aim at our current state of ever-increasing economic inequality. One wishes she would have done it more often.

In the final third of this propulsive yarn, Evie, still very much on the lam, reacts to comments by an editorial writer who makes fun of her situation—$90K school loan debt, lame job. She muses:

I was a failure, taking out my resentment on good, hardworking people. To prove it, he listed all the folksy millionaires who’d come before me. Men who’d come from nothing, who lifted themselves up by their bootstraps and made capitalism their bitch. An army of cowboys trudging uphill through the snow, planting their flag on Wall Street. I was the face of the editorial’s mockery, but I was only a symptom of a larger malignancy. These gaping wounds walk among us, he warned—the debtors, the renters, the generations at the end of the alphabet, born for the end of the world.

As a tale of two outlaws (and eventual lovers) driving seemingly endless miles across America, staying one crucial step in front of the law, Killer Potential hits all its marks. Deitch vividly describes the lives of two sort-of-criminals who must cope with extraordinary pressures, knowing that at any moment the party could end, maybe with their deaths. Although Evie’s quasi-philosophizing about life in the early 2020s occasionally rambles on a bit long, the author mostly hones her perspective to a crystalline—and often hilarious—point. Jae is harder to pin down, but that is very likely the purpose of her distinct alienation.

Killer Potential is a crime novel with originality to burn. And Hannah Deitch is a talent to watch.