Ohio native’s new novel is inspired by the Chillicothe Six
‘On the Savage Side’ narrated one of the dead
Tiffany Mcdaniel’s devastating new novel follows a doomed young woman in Chillicothe.
Mcdaniel, author of “Betty,” loosely bases the novel on the story of the Chillicothe Six, a half-dozen women who disappeared or were found dead in Chillicothe in 2014 and 2015. The author dedicates her work to the six women.
“On the Savage Side” (Knopf, $29, 464 pages), set two decades earlier, is narrated from beyond the grave by Arcade, one of the murdered women.
She and her twin sister Daffodil grow up in a household with a drug-addicted mother and aunt, both of whom turn to prostitution to support themselves and their habit. Their father has died of an overdose, and the one stabilizing presence in their life, the grandmother they call “Mamaw Milkweed,” dies after being hit by a car when they are very young.
That grandmother, whose advice and ability to make a home even under harsh circumstances often come back to the girls as they grow up, is the one who teaches them about the “savage side” and the “beautiful side.” Showing them a block of crochet she is working on, she turns it over to reveal the raggedy bits of yarn on the opposite side, and tells them how to make that side beautiful, too, by working the ends of yarn into the pattern.
“You make the savage side beautiful with a needle,” she says, with no awareness of the irony of her statement.
The girls take her lesson to heart, and use their imaginations to transform even the most horrific events of their short lives into happy memories. They use markers to draw the birthday cakes they never actually receive onto the raw wood floor of their home, and fantasize about eating them. And when they are raped, night after night, by one of their mother’s clients, whom they call “The Spider,” they imagine that their dad returns to kill him, chasing him down and squashing him beneath his boot heel. That power of imagination stays with the narrator throughout her life, making her experiences almost bearable.
Mcdaniel treats the women who “walk the streets of Chillicothe with holes in their arms” with great tenderness, far more tenderness than they receive in life. The women who are killed are friends of Arc’s, addicted to drugs and paying for their habits with prostitution, but they’re also distinct individuals, and each step they make to get out of the life, even if temporary, provides a flicker of hope and light that make their inevitable fates more horrifying.
They’re “women who could have been queens in a different parade, had they not been too at home in the hole they seemed to dig deeper with every passing day.”
Readers shouldn’t come to “On the Savage Side” expecting a typical crime novel. Mcdaniel makes it clear that any or all of the men in the grim world the girls inhabit are capable of killing them and dumping their bodies in the river, so it almost doesn’t matter who is the “real” killer.
She also isn’t concerned with making the language naturalistic. Everyone in the novel − from Mamaw Milkweed to the twins and their friends, to the aunt who spends every non-working hour watching travel shows on TV, to the tattoo artist and drug dealer who freezes snakes in his backroom, to the motel clerk who stitches together videos of women crying − speaks a heightened, poetic language likely never heard in Chillicothe or anywhere else, full of mythological and literary references.
Disconcerting at first, the language quickly comes to feel normal, a way of bringing the characters’ deeper feelings to the surface.
The young women, and the world in which they live, won’t easily be forgotten.
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