A Marriage Hanging On by a Thread in ALL DRESSED UP (2022)

Originally posted June 17, 2024.

Somehow it had never occurred to me, in the hundreds—maybe thousands—of hours I’d spent bingeing stories just like this, that every whodunit really involved a double murder: of the victim, but also of some intangible but deeply vital part of the killer’s own humanity.

Ah, murder mystery games. So much more fun in theory than they are in practice. I won’t deny daydreaming about blowing $1000 to deduct in costume at an isolated ski lodge, even though my experiences with the budget version range from the group coming up with an elaborate spy theory while missing the cigarette clue to “Oops, we all accidentally read our entire character sheets and now have to pretend we don’t know who did it.” They end up being more of a conversation piece for buzzed socializing than an exercise in narrative. On the bright side, you rarely have to wonder if one of your guests is an actual murderer, like the unfortunate protagonist of All Dressed Up by Jilly Gagnon.

Rebecca “Becka” Wilson is attending a lavish murder mystery weekend with her husband Blake and three other couples. The getaway is an apology present from Blake for his recent affair—although he keeps the “murder” part a secret, causing Becka to be humiliated at the start of the game. Blake sucks. (My apologies to fans of #Blecka.) His negative traits are things like ‘positioning his wife as an irrational paranoid harpy after he cheated on her for months,’ while his positive traits include having a dimple, always bringing the right present, and being able to fall asleep anywhere, which puts him about on par with the average delivery driver. Becka knows full well that everyone in her circle and probably us readers want her to dump his worthless ass, but thanks to late-capitalist ennui and stress about her future plans, she hasn’t decided if she wants a divorce yet. Instead of addressing her lingering resentment, she throws herself into the game, drinking like a fish and swallowing enough bile to warrant a pantoprazole scrip. But she’s truly distracted when one of the production’s minor performers goes missing, under odd circumstances that lead her to suspect foul play. Maybe even… MURDER.

Both All Dressed Up‘s in-universe events and the construction of the book blend the mystery with the murder mystery game. Chapters are interspersed with dossiers on the punnily-named caricature game PCs, but the dramatis personae introduces the “real” characters with the kind of sassy two-sentence bios you’d expect for dinner roleplay. And the players and characters correspond in on-the-nose ways. Becka and Blake’s characters aren’t married; she plays an ingenue while he plays a playboy bachelor. This narrative onion seriously messes with Becka’s head as she tries to determine whether her fellow players are acting suspiciously or… acting, suspiciously. Has she discovered a real clue, or a game clue, or a real clue disguised as a game clue? Did that conversation really happen, and—either way—was it meant to be overheard?

Make no mistake, despite the mystery trappings, this is a psychological thriller with the aesthetics of a fair-play detective novel. Most of the book is dedicated to Becka ruminating over whether anything sinister happened at all. (Side note: wouldn’t it be hilarious if, just once, it did turn out that the protagonist had imagined the whole thing?) It’s a lot like End of Story in that way, although I didn’t enjoy being in Becka’s head as much as Nicky’s (much as that book was quite silly, Nicky Hunter remains Best Girl and GOAT thriller leading lady).

As a protagonist trait, I find passive-aggression to be perhaps the toughest sell out there, even more than the kind of ultra-casual prose style that Becka employs. In theory, the main character is supposed to be driving the action, so sitting through long stretches of narration where Becka explains why she can’t [verbalize her feelings/get a divorce/tell someone what is going on] because no one would listen to her anyway, and instead dropping hints, started to grate after a while. She’s quite judgmental, too—always commenting on whether other women have wrinkles, or Botox, or snidely deadnaming her college friend because there’s no way this person could truly be happy and polyamorous, and is doubtless just affecting these lifestyle changes to seem superior to our maritally-enmired heroine. This is thematically tied to the resolution of the mystery (of course there is an actual mystery), but I wouldn’t say it was fully addressed. There’s also a bit of a therapized “both sides” implication, that Becka’s emotional constipation and Blake failing to respect her are equal problems. The format was incredibly fun, and really does pastiche this kind of game quite well, but no matter how it was dressed up, the story about marital drama was not to my taste.