In Canadian author Liann Zhang’s debut novel Julie Chan is Dead, Zhang takes us on a winding journey through the sordid underbelly of the influencer economy. Told from the perspective of Julie, a downtrodden grocery store cashier, Julie’s life is turned on its proverbial head after she receives a mysterious call from her estranged twin sister, influencer Chloe VanHussen.
After being separated as children following their parents’ deaths, Chloe and Julie’s lives head in drastically different directions. While Chloe is adopted by an affluent white couple, the VanHussens, Julie is sent to live with her surly aunt, who’s always quick to remind Julie what a burden she’s been.
After Chloe assumes an uncharacteristic silence on social media following the troubling call, Julie goes to find her, only to discover her twin dead. Panicked, Julie passes Chloe off as herself while she assumes Chloe’s picture-perfect life as an influencer. With Chloe dead, Julie is free to bask in all the superficial glamour Chloe’s influencer lifestyle has afforded her. Despite Chloe’s Instagram-hardened carapace of wealth and ease, Julie quickly discovers Chloe’s life isn’t anything like it seems online.
Drawing from Zhang’s brief tenure as a skincare influencer (or skinfluencer if you will), Julie Chan Is Dead is the epitome of a page-turner. Zhang’s prose has an electric propulsion that makes putting the novel aside difficult. Peppered with sardonic humor and prescient lampooning of the influencer industry, Zhang wraps us into the confining web of Chloe’s mysterious life as Julie tumbles deeper down the rabbit hole of Chloe’s illusory life.
Told from a claustrophobic first-person perspective, readers are pushed right up against Julie’s every rotten thought and self-inflicted crisis, bending over backwards alongside her to perform the mental gymnastics she utilizes to justify her shambolic assumption of Chloe’s life. As in any novel, Zhang’s work requires a healthy suspension of disbelief. This suspension, however, becomes increasingly trying as the novel unwinds and unravels beyond the confines of any assumed reality.
Despite Julie Chang Is Dead’s enrapturing premise and plot, few of the characters are given much depth beyond their superficial caricatures of influencers. The two exceptions are Julie and Bella Marie, the leader of a cultish clique of influencers Chloe recently joined. The other influencers under Bella Marie’s shared control devolve into a sort of hive mind, each indiscernible from one another with the exception of a few aesthetic differences.
While this “hive mind” group mentality certainly reinforces the cult-like existence of the Belladonnas (a nickname for the members of the group under the impossibly wealthy and glamorous Bella Marie’s tutelage), it becomes a bit tired and reductive by the novel’s close.
While Julie Chang Is Dead is bookended by a sort of grounded reality (namely Julie’s monotonous daily life as a cashier at the start and a legal imbroglio to wrap everything up), parts of the Belladonna’s cultish aesthetic seem uninspired in contrast to the rest of the story. Matching white uniforms, cheery smiles concealing something sinister, the inexplicable worship of some kind of imagined deity, all these tired tropes make appearances in Julie Chan Is Dead, distracting from an otherwise engrossing narrative.
Whereas some of the “cult of social media” themes aren’t exactly groundbreaking writing, Zhang touches on more engaging themes like race, tokenism, and how minorities can be complicit in the subjugation of their own kind. Midway through the novel, Chloe (i.e., Julie) laments to fellow influencer and newly recruited Belladonna Isla about the uncomfortable position each of them is in as the sole people of color in a sea of bleached blonde Barbies made animate.
Isla, a Black woman who has been recruited in an effort to rehabilitate the image of a recently cancelled Belladonna, voices her frustration to Julie about being a token minority within the group. Julie, while sympathetic and understanding, comes across unconcerned by her own presence as the token Asian since it’s this very tokenism that allows her within the Belladonna’s luxurious orbit.
Near Julie Chan Is Dead‘s crescendo, it seems Zhang is about to jump the shark in a way that could jeopardize the rest of the novel’s promising work. Yet, just before she veers us off the cliff, she pulls the story back into more grounded territory. Zhang does an excellent job infusing the novel’s latter legal complication with the kind of sharp and incisive prose that gives the best kind of legal and true crime writing its kick.
A chimeric hybrid of social commentary, satire, and a whodunit mystery, Julie Chan Is Dead is a darkly funny thriller that demands to be devoured in a single sitting. While some parts of the novel are bogged down by imperfect plotting, wonky logic, and a smattering of deus ex machina to keep the plot moving forward at a breakneck speed, Zhang’s debut is undeniably the heralding of a new and exciting voice in contemporary fiction.