As he tells his story, Gilad Elbom—narrator of Scream Queens of the Dead Sea, a recent debut novel by the author of the same name—reflects on the act of writing. In particular, he muses on his attempts to chronicle his own life—an ongoing project that he suggests will take the form of a novel titled Scream Queens of the Dead Sea. This literary circular logic defines the book. Creating a fictional persona that is self-absorbed to the point of caricature, Elbom turns navel-gazing to his advantage, using the character/author mirroring to create a story that appeals in spite of—or perhaps because of—an unsympathetic protagonist and an ambiguous point of view.
Scream Queens covers only a few days, during which its narrator—a recent graduate of a university linguistics program—searches for direction while working as a nurse at the Tranquil Haven Mental Health Center near Jerusalem. He also pursues a romance with Carmel, a woman waiting for her husband to die of cancer, whom he has met at the Hebrew University library. Their relationship is Elbom’s first test of his readers’ patience: while Carmel embarks on the affair excitedly—she had married only to gain a military exemption—Elbom uses her as a literal punching bag for his aggression, daring his audience to keep reading even after he boasts of plans to “slap Carmel across the face and tell her to take her clothes off.”
This device, employed throughout, keeps the reader perversely engrossed: Elbom is so unsympathetic a character that it’s impossible not to wonder whether the author is sincere, caricaturing himself, or simply testing the reader’s tolerance and credulousness. Before there’s time to guess, he reveals more of his true (or are they fictional?) colors. Elbom’s fear of terrorism pervades much of his thinking, and it would elicit more sympathy if it didn’t translate into nearly hysterical prejudice toward Palestinians. He meets Ramzy, a Palestinian, while gambling in Jericho—and immediately concludes that Ramzy is “a natural born suicide bomber” who has “been waiting his whole life for this perfect chance to kill himself along with two evil Jews.” Elbom insists on holding this view even after Ramzy gives him a captivating tour of Jericho and welcomes him into his home, again making us wonder whether he is created in his author’s likeness, or a severe distortion thereof.
Two voices manage to break through our narrator’s bubble: Carmel’s and that of Ibrahim Ibrahim—a Palestinian placed in the hospital after stabbing an Israeli soldier. Carmel and Ibrahim are already so far on the fringes of society that their perspectives don’t threaten Elbom. Indeed, Ibrahim is the only character to gain Elbom’s sympathy. The narrator relates his life story, from early years in Nablus throwing stones at Israeli soldiers to the stabbing and his arrest. As it happens, Ibrahim’s crime was not ideologically motivated; rather, he hoped that nearby soldiers would kill him in retaliation, and thus rid himself of the hallucinations—particularly one of a giant snake—that haunted him.
Though Elbom’s narrator admits that “the fact that he killed a teenage girl makes me a little nervous,” he spends an entire day tracking down Ibrahim’s medical file and advocates for his hospital stay instead of prison. These acts of altruism are a major step for the self-obsessed Elbom, who says he hopes that his sympathetic behavior toward Ibrahim is “making [Ibrahim] human.” Perhaps he hopes that by showing sympathy for someone else—even in this most perverse of cases—he is in turn humanizing himself.
Toward the end of the book, Carmel discovers the author’s manuscript, reads it, and comments that it’s poorly written. The fictional Elbom finally admits on the last page that he is recording his life “because I am escaping.” And escape he has: as the novel closes, Elbom’s character appears to have been changed little by the characters and events around him. He tells the reader that he is “standing here, on top of the mountain, waiting,” but despite a talent for descriptions, he never indicates what he is waiting for.
Scream Queens leaves the reader with the distinct feeling that author Elbom doesn’t line up with his fictional self, but remains too tight-lipped to give us the benefit of knowing how or why. Maybe he’s suggesting that a little self-chronicling can help us all see—and move beyond – our inner caricatures. Maybe he’s insinuating the opposite, that writing life down just helps the author to avoid living it. Either way, Elbom provides a caustic, thought-provoking ride, and hints at a more trenchant thesis that, for now, he lets the reader glimpse but never fully see.
