Dusted Off: Hello Kitty Must Die

I’ve often felt conflicted about my appreciation for protagonists/leading characters who are murderers–professional hitmen (Peter Brown, Jimmy the Tulip, Martin Blank, Hawk, Jules Winnfield) or serial killers (Dexter Morgan, early Hannibal Lecter), but I can usually get over it because of what their creators do with them. But Angela S. Choi’s Fiona Fi Yu, from Hello Kitty Must Die, doesn’t get to join their ranks in my book. There’s little to commend her, or the book, if you ask me (which is sort of implied if you’ve read this far).

Fi is a successful, thirtysomething Chinese-American lawyer, living with her parents, who stumbles into serial killing (I’ll leave the details to those who read it). An unpleasant childhood, filled with overbearing parents, a strict Catholic school, and one sociopathic friend primes this perpetually single (and proud!) woman for an adulthood that’s even more unpleasant. Until the aforementioned stumbling, anyway. She’s a whiny, selfish, me-first person all the way, with a personality only a parakeet could love. Essentially, she’s a very unpleasant person–beyond the murdering. Sure, she can mix pop culture references into her narrative like Dennis Miller in his prime, but in a post-Tarantino/Whedon/Apatow/Abed Nadir age, is that really so noteworthy? Besides, if Humbert Humbert taught us nothing at all, he taught us that “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

What about the story itself? It starts off semi-promising, and then goes straight downhill from there. Well, let me amend that. It starts off offensively, but it’s a staged, calculated offensiveness. Choi trades in an actual narrative hook for a hook constructed of shock value. But a few pages later, it gets semi-promising. There’s no redemption of the character–not even growth. Nothing commendable about the events, characters, or cultural commentary.

On the other hand, it was a quick read.