TheDaak review

How to Kill Men and Get Away With It by Katy Brent, HarperCollins, Paperback, Published: 12 May 2022, 368 Pages, 198x129mm, ISBN: 9780008539865, £8.99

by Anika Madaan

Katy Brent’s debut work How to Kill Men and Get Away With It in 2022 came as a razor-sharp, humorous critique of modern-day gender politics, violence, patriarchy and the illusion of protection of women. With satire, dark humour and a subversive application of genre conventions, Katy denounces the manner in which society tends to psychologically manipulate the ill experience of harassment and exploitation of women, especially during the modern-day social media and influencer culture and the online era. This book review discusses how this novel, in terms of satire, humour, and power, explains how Katy Brent uses genre fiction not only to engage an audience, but to challenge, provoke, and question societal norms.  

The novel is centred on the female protagonist named Kitty Collins, a social media influencer who happens to kill someone accidentally and then accepts it with disconcerting complacency. When Collins kills a man who was trying to sexually assault her, she experiences a strange sense of empowerment and continues to kill abusive men, some known to her personally, others significantly chosen as symbols of systematic and patriarchal male violence, and her acts become a ghoulish or spectral type of vigilante justice.  It is a story that seamlessly integrates the features of the genre of crime fiction, psychological thriller, and dark comedy. Katy spins Kitty’s character and inner monologue with clever wit and calculated and structured irony. This reveals the disconnection between societal perception of influencers as privileged and superficial and the actual lived experiences of women who endure patriarchal violence, objectification, and harassment on a day-to-day basis. 

Brent uses satire as a social weapon as in its essence the book is a dismantling of contemporary femininity and patriarchy that is shaped by changing cultural, social, and political contexts, a form of response to centuries of male-centred narratives. The satire begins in the very first chapter with the author using an over-the-top narrative to bring attention to the ridiculosity of contemporary influencer lore, gender expectations and society’s hypocrisy. Kitty Collins is a woman consumed by Instagram algorithms and oat milk lattes and is at once a parody and a punchline, but underlying this humour lies a keen feminist critique where Kitty is the social animal who is a female and thus, must perform with perfection in a society that both commodifies and threatens her. Katy hyperbolises Collins’ use of aesthetics and online validation not to satirise her but in order to critique the flawed system that has substituted true agency with a commodified one. The sarcasm is drawn in parallel with earlier feminist works such as Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, but with a more thriller-based tone. The radicalism of the protagonists’ decisions, such as killing as a way of resistance, bears no prescription for action, but is rather rendered as a metaphor in answer to the social indemnity of misogynistic violence, which  lays bare the inability of the current judicial systems to safeguard women and brings ironic revenge through fiction. 

Another wheel that drives the story is its dark humour that allows the author to approach vicious topics and here the work lies in its function as imaginative catharsis–where there is space for a reader to explore fantasies vengeful in nature through fiction but are actually thought-provoking. There are constant streams of events in the novel where the reader will be pushed to laugh at a certain thing and then instantly be put  into thought about what they are laughing at, whether it be  toxic or vile masculinity, injustice or hypocrisy. For example, in the scenario of Kitty’s wisecracking asides during the accident- arrangement scenes are so ridiculous that they edge on slapstick but at the same time also compel the reader to encounter a deeper unease leading to the thought as to why it should be satisfying for a predator to be punished even in fiction and that too in an extrajudicial manner. Katy Brent weaponises ironic humour to destroy and disrupt moral dualities. The satire and humour do not excuse the protagonist but instead force readers to question the systems through which the real-world perpetrators manage to escape the sanctions, but the book echoes feminine vengeance to critique harassment and rape culture.

The most provocative and controversial of the novel’s themes is power, who possesses it, who uses it and how it is exercised and, if so, whether its transfer transforms it. The murders committed by Collins can be interpreted as acts of reclamation of a woman who is constantly monitored, objectified, and judged and takes power in the most violent manner for freedom. Kitty circumvents the system that often conceptualises violence in male-centric terms, but the author muddies up the picture as Kitty starts to enjoy the killings not only for truth and justice but for the thrill. As the murder toll grows, the readers are likely to question: is Kitty Collins actually becoming the very villain she despises? Is her power a recasting of patriarchy? Or just a mirror image of it? The author does not answer these questions concisely and the ambiguity is deliberate. As Michel Foucault notes ‘power is not an institution, nor a structure. It is the name given to a complex strategic situation’ (1995).  Kitty’s behaviour brings about the realisation that power can corrupt anyone, irrespective of gender, and yet, in a society where power has been traditionally held by men, her misdemeanours are read less as corruption and more as disobedience. But the story is not so much about condoning Kitty and her violence, as it is about bringing out in open the fantasy of violent justice that is not actually lawful. The novel’s treatment of violence and its implications require a more nuanced approach and handling than was presented; the use of satire to address serious issues of gender discrimination and violence demands a careful navigation between entertainment, awareness and advocacy. 

One of the focal points of the critique is that Katy addresses the way modern day social media culture has developed a new kind of method of surveillance, one that is not put in force by the government or statutory authority, but by the followers, collaborative brands and algorithms. Kitty Collins, as a lifestyle influencer, performs for an imagined public, even her grief, her love interests and eventually her real self are mediated through her smartphone. The book unveils the shallowness of this virtual world, particularly where it exists in tandem with violent secrets. So, Collins gets away with it partly just because she is a young, rich, beautiful white woman. By doing so, the author critiques race and class privilege even within feminist circles. She kills men, but she remains beholden to the systems of capital and beauty that support her influencer lifestyle. The story’s implication is that real power is always out of reach, even for women who have transgressed and flouted all the rules. 

The timeline of the novel in which it comes out to the public also decides its impact on the society and the readers. How to Kill Men and Get Away with It came on the heels of increased public discourse on gender-based violence sparked by incidents in real life, such as the killing of Sarah Everard in the United Kingdom and the Sakinaka rape and murder case in Mumbai (2021) and many more such brutalities. The reception of the book was highly polarised. While some hailed it as a gutsy feminist thriller, others saw it as a violent yet humorous read. The book’s commercial success, though significant, also raises questions about the commodification of feminist rage and how such forces change and mould public and political discourse, and its positioning as both a social commentary and as an entertainment source highlights more explicit acknowledgement of these issues. 

How to Kill Men and Get Away With It by Katy Brent is a highly provocative book that tiptoes the thin line of enjoyment and harassment between social media and entertainment. Through the deployment of satire, dark humour, and power differences along gender lines, the readers are compelled to see uncomfortable realities about safety, justice and freedom to use power without any fallouts or penalties. By spinning feminist outrage in influencer shimmer and gallows humour, the book is written in a way that is both subversive and stinging and is uncompromisingly bold. In a society that tends to censor women’s outrage or commodifies it for profits, Katy puts it up dirty, bloody and hilarious. Ultimately, this novel is not an incitement to violence but an incitement to listen, to the women who are not heard, to the deaf systems that facilitate abusers and to the potential that justice, at least in the world of fiction, can have a side of humour and a sharp knife. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Brent, K. (2022). How to Kill Men and Get Away With It. HarperCollins.
2. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (n Sheridan, A. Trans.). Vintage Books.
3. R v Couzens [2021]. Sentencing Remarks of Lord Justice Fulford. Central Criminal Court, September 30, 2021.
4. State of Maharashtra v Mohan Kathwaru Chauhan. Sessions Court, Mumbai, 2021.

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