Supernatural thriller The Perishing is a luminous love letter to Los Angeles

But then: “1930 was the decade I learned to fight back,” Sarah says near the end of the prologue, and we meet her once more as Lou, a young Black woman who wakes up naked and memoryless in a Los Angeles alley, and who grounds the rest of the novel in a hyper-specific time and place. At this point in her immortal journey, Lou doesn’t remember any of her past lives, much less where her current body came from. Over the next 200 pages, as meta-narrative clues slowly accumulate, Lou blossoms into a fiercely intelligent journalist, first at her desegregated high school, then as the first Black female reporter at the Los Angeles Times. She starts on the “death desk” (perfect for an immortal, right?) before covering real-life history as it happens, like Route 66’s displacement of Black neighborhoods.

In consistently gorgeous prose, Deón rivals Nelson Algren’s Chicago: City On The Make when she writes about L.A. “Los Angeles has always been brown. And unlike all the other great American cities—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston—there is no sensible reason for Los Angeles to exist,” Lou says in an early chapter.

Los Angeles was born with no natural port, no good river connections, no suitable harbor sites, and no critical location advantage. And precisely for these reasons—because being born with very little and having no safe place are the fuels for the greatest imaginations—Los Angeles would rise. Imagination and enthusiasm are the currency of world builders.

Perhaps it’s no mistake that in Deón’s telling, Los Angeles is as much a temporal anomaly as Lou is.

As she grows into her life, Lou discovers her wounds heal instantly. Her dreams take her to times and places she’s never seen, like an English cathedral in the year 1620. And over and over again, she draws the face of a man she’s never met—until the day she does. All the while, Sarah Shipley crashes into the novel from the 22nd century every few chapters for a brief section of her own.

In its final 50 pages, The Perishing’s immortal frame narrative takes center stage again and sprints to a surprising conclusion. If you’ve enjoyed Lou’s chapters purely as historical fiction, the denouement may strike a dissonant chord. But it’s as brilliant and unprecedented as the rest of the book, sheds new light on the opening chapters, and sews all of Deón’s narrative threads back together in a uniquely satisfying way. Grace may have announced the arrival of a singular new voice, but The Perishing does not sit in its shadow; it burns as bright as the Hollywoodland sign once did, “studded with four thousand light bulbs.”