Over a five-year period, Martha Johnson murders her four children, one by one, in order to punish her husband when they argue, but Martha is no ordinary serial killer. She murders her children by using the bulk of her 250-pound body to suffocate them. Unlike other fictionalized true-crime novels, Underneath neither valorizes nor focuses on the specific acts of violence. Instead, it attempts to understand how feelings of powerlessness, the residue of trauma, and the need to find justice in a world that refuses to give a fat body justice finds its only respite through murder.

About the Author
Lily Hoang is the author of five books, including A Bestiary (finalist for a PEN USA Nonfiction Book Award) and Changing (recipient of a PEN Open Books Award). She has been a Mellon Fellow at Rhodes University in South Africa, a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College, and a Cultural Exchange Faculty Fellow at Wuhan University in China. To date, she has taught creative writing on five continents. She currently teaches in the MFA Program at UC San Diego. She lives in San Diego, California.

Reviews

"In a word, wow! ... Underneath is spell-binding. You almost want to read it in one sitting but you can stop anywhere and come back to it." -Patch

"Beautiful sentences telling a dreadful, tragic tale of love, in its absence and its perverse, incomprehensible to normies, twisted shapes." -Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud

"A memorably chilling, compulsively engaging, deftly crafted and thought-provoking read from an author with a genuine flair for originality and the kind narrative driven storytelling is the foundation literary excellence, Underneath is especially recommended for the personal lists of mature readers and for community library Contemporary Crime Fiction collections." -Midwest Book Review

"Underneath is a haunting novel about the making of a serial killer." -Eileen Gonzalez, Forward Review

Awards
Winner of Red Hen Press Fiction Award 2019 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781636280042
Author Lily Hoang
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Red Hen Press
Publisher Red Hen Press