Strange Trip

Leslie Baird’s debut novel, Salomé, offers a genre-defying tale: a bildungsroman wrapped in layers of gothic mysticism, with a reimagined classic femme fatale. Set in the quiet French village of Châteaubriant, it’s a mind-bendingly good read.

Baird, who lived in Nashville for years before moving to Europe, begins the story simply enough: Courtney, an aspiring journalist from Raleigh who has recently lost her job, returns to France for a weeklong reunion with her study-abroad roommate and to celebrate her 31st birthday. But what is intended to be a happy return becomes something stranger after she encounters Salomé on the flight over.

Courtney and Salomé meet with a small, telling exchange: Courtney gives up her aisle seat at Salomé’s indirect request. The two hit it off, laughing and swapping breakup stories about men they deem unworthy. When Salomé invites Courtney to her mother’s home in Châteaubriant, Courtney surprises both herself and Salomé by agreeing.

Courtney is a self-described Francophile to the point that she prefers “French Courtney,” a version of herself shaped by idealization and time spent in France, over her everyday self. “I swear there was a shimmer to [Salomé],” Courtney thinks, “that I’d never have, not even if I got everything I wanted in life.” In Salomé’s presence, Courtney feels more like the person she longs to become. “God,” she reflects, “I was so devastatingly American.” Her romantic notions provide Courtney with a distraction from thinking about her mother in North Carolina, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

The Chateâubriant house is creepy. Cameras sit in the upper corners of every room, their presence explained as security installed by Salomé’s stepfather, Marco. Salomé’s mother, Nathalie, is unhealthily thin and severe, “the image of Medusa,” Courtney thinks. Even domestic gestures there feel inhuman, and Courtney has disturbing nightmares. In the first, Salome tries to seduce her, directing Courtney not to open her eyes, then repeatedly saying, “Let me in.” In a later dream, a silver boa constrictor unspools from Courtney’s mouth and wraps itself around Nathalie’s throat. She wakes up sleepwalking and later finds herself dreaming from the vantage point of one of the security cameras.

In waking life, however, Courtney and Salome are having a great time, sharing a natural rapport. They walk on the beach, drink Oranginas, and exchange confidences about their respective relationships and families. Salome’s now-deceased father, Thierry, was a geneticist whose work on longevity and metaphysics blurred lines between science and transcendence. Salome explains that Marco, formerly employed by Thierry, runs a business selling vitamins that promise to delay or even evade death. Of his vitamins, Salome says, “They are like … if you cut cardboard and make it into pills and sell it for a lot of money.” Marco is a snake oil salesman, but that’s only the half of it.

What starts as a tantalizing slow burn grows sinister as Courtney questions how deep Marco’s influence extends. Is Nathalie a villain or a victim? To what extent are eugenics and astral projection part of this mystery? After Nathalie accuses Courtney of stealing, Courtney must leave, but on the train platform, Salomé kisses her. Courtney’s voice anchors the book, but the more vulnerable she becomes and the more frightening her circumstances, the more heightened is her sense of urgency to save Salomé, to uncover the truth. Needless to say, she returns to Châteaubriant.

Salomé takes a classic tale of the young femme fatale and reimagines it in astonishingly creative ways, constructed not through a male gaze but by placing women in the center of the story. Thierry’s theories about extending life and astral projection, Marco’s commercialization of longevity, and his control over Nathalie form a system in which death is never entirely settled.

Ultimately, Courtney finds herself reckoning with her capital-T Truth, the key to her own actualization:

My mother’s death loomed on the horizon like a distant milepost I couldn’t directly look at, though I knew someday I’d have to. I’d almost started anticipating the relief as much as the pain. The pain of losing her exacerbated by the pain of never being close in the first place, time fleeting by, robbing me of the chance to get my shit together and try harder.

This is the heart of the novel, the journey and the destination. Baird’s prose is gorgeous and lucid, weaving atmosphere with nuanced actions and thoughts. Courtney is not simply haunted by Salomé and her family; she is drawn into a world in which identity, memory, and even mortality feel permeable. The desire to be more fully seen can inadvertently lead to being absorbed, but it doesn’t have to. Salomé is complex — fantastical and twisted, surprising and smart. And the real beauty of Courtney’s story is that it is utterly human.