On the primary web page of Dizz Tate’s debut novel Brutes, a 14-year-old woman has gone lacking from Falls Landing, Florida, the place screams from close by theme parks ripple by way of the air and a foreboding lake divides a walled-off improvement from rundown residence towers.

The lacking woman, a TV preacher’s daughter named Sammy Liu-Lou, had lived sheltered behind the event’s tall white partitions, and her disappearance instantly turns into an occasion. Women who appear “built for church, in skorts and pastel-colored sweaters” strap on headlamps and strike out into the summer season evening searching for the woman, avoiding the lake that gleams as black as an oil slick.

But whereas “Where is she?” repeats all through Brutes like an incantation, this is not a guide primarily involved with discovering Sammy. Instead, Tate sidesteps the lacking woman trope and makes the way more compelling option to focus her lens on a pack of 13-year-old women who’re used to mixing into the background. “No one looks at us and this gives us a brutal power,” the ladies narrate as one. They watch the city mobilize from their residence home windows the evening Sammy goes lacking, binoculars affording them omniscience. “We always know where Sammy is,” the ladies say, however nobody would ever suppose to query them.

Much of Brutes unspools on this mesmerizing first-person plural, within the hive thoughts of 5 women and a queer boy (thought-about one among them) — Leila, Britney, Jody, Hazel, Isabel, and Christian — who scorch their naked ft as they creep round on “white-hot sidewalks” and take within the city’s secrets and techniques. They are the titular brutes, who experience pulling mean-spirited stunts that tighten their bonds. In plunging the reader into the ladies’ collective perspective, Brutes makes for an unique and stylistically bold tackle the well-trodden material of women in peril.

Tate completely captures the simultaneous impatience and mercurial swings of girlhood, the place you’re feeling as for those who’re rising older by the day however are nonetheless left “behind, as invisible to them as air now, little kids with large backpacks.” The women began spying on Sammy out of a want to step exterior of their very own lives, which chafe and itch like too-tight restraints. Sammy is just not solely wealthier and a yr older, however she has made some attention-grabbing strikes — shaving off her “curtain” of darkish hair and becoming a member of forces with Mia, whose mom runs Star Search, an costly program that guarantees auditions with a Hollywood casting agent. The women learn Sammy and Mia’s altering nail polish shades like tea leaves, hoping to crack the code to lastly be observed and chosen for Star Search recruitment: “We squashed our faces against the glass of our own lives. Is this it?…We filled up our days following them, watching them, waiting to be invited in.”

As Brutes progresses, Tate intercuts the propulsive chapters of “we” with jumps ahead into every woman’s singular future, delving into how they’re individually haunted by what occurred the summer season when Sammy disappeared. The first chapter within the first-person singular comes a couple of quarter of the way in which by way of the novel, jarring the reader out of a dream and revealing that the hive thoughts has not made it out intact. Because the ladies aren’t a lot developed as people within the “we” chapters — in any case, they by no means wish to be alone or to disagree — I discovered myself flipping again pages for reminders of which one was Hazel, the primary woman afforded her personal voice. I puzzled if the ensemble was too crowded for such splintering. Ultimately, although, these fast-forwards ominously shade the motion of the novel’s current, because the seek for Sammy continues, the ladies creep nearer to Mia, and the hazards and prospects of girlhood shimmer on the edges.

The one predictable transfer Tate makes in Brutes? While Mia palms out Star Search enterprise playing cards to women she deems fairly sufficient to mannequin, a sleazy photographer named Stone is the true gatekeeper, and women win his approval in his gleaming pink home behind the event’s partitions. Thankfully, as an alternative of detailing Stone’s misdeeds, Tate focuses her commentary on how the city’s tradition has enabled him. In Falls Landing, swampy decay and corruption lurks beneath each veneer.

Far extra uncommon than Stone, and thus extra intriguing, is the polluted lake and its enigmatic position in Sammy’s disappearance and the ladies’ haunting. In its unusual stillness and sticky foulness, the lake holds a darkish secret of its personal. By staining Brutes with the murky waters of the lake, Tate provides depth and welcome weirdness to what might need been a extra atypical nightmare.

Kristen Martin is engaged on a guide on American orphanhood for Bold Type Books. Her writing has additionally appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Baffler, and elsewhere. She tweets at @kwistent.