Book Review: I Contain Multitudes by Christopher Hawkins

Reviewed by Victoria Lilly

A throng of terror, loss, doubt, and reckoning with trauma swirls together in a collage of wondrous worlds.

Trina Bell is on the run. Strange human-like shadows chase her across towns and fields. But their nightmarish presence pales in strangeness compared to what happens to her with each new day. The world is changing.

The rough outline might stay similar, but details change, and no one recalls her presence from the previous cycle. No one, that is, until Trina meets an old librarian by the name of Colin. He, too, changes with the turnings, but he remains a librarian, and he remembers Trina even as days and worlds pass. This oddity unsettles Trina, and she latches onto Colin as a life buoy. 

Concerned for Trina—bewildered, young, alone in the world, and on the run from shadows—Colin takes her to a sanctuary for dispossessed girls. At first Trina believes she has finally found a safe harbor, someplace to make sense of what has been happening to her.

Then she meets the asylum’s resident physician, Dr. Sweets, and what he tells her disorients Trina even more than the turnings of the world have done: that she is the cause of them. From that point on, Trina is on an ever more desperate run for her life; from the shadows, the accelerating crumbling of each successive world, and Dr. Sweets himself. Yet the more she runs, the more she comes to realize that her pursuers might not just be behind her, but also within.

While the premise of multiple universes is hardly new in popular culture, success of certain Marvel films and, in 2022, Everything Everywhere All at Once has certainly increased the concept’s popularity and visibility. To put a fresh and compelling spin on it is, therefore, no small feat. I am happy to say that Christopher Hawkins has achieved such a feat with this book.

Jumping from small-town flyover-country America, to a Victorianesque metropolis, to a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and more, I Contain Multitudes contains quite a few worlds. Certain motifs connect each of them into a cycle. The library, where Colin works. The asylum for dispossessed women. The ensemble of recurring characters, from the kind and helpful Edie, to the increasingly violent and erratic Dr. Sweets.

Hawkins’s seamless and simple prose immerses the reader in every successive world so thoroughly, I wished each episode within the novel was a book in its own right. The cast and the constant locations and motifs not only give cohesion to the multiverse storyline, but attachment to them are the bricks upon which the structure of heightening tensions and stakes solidly rests.

At the center of the story, Trina begins as a relatively characterless figure. We know she is on the run, that she doesn’t dwell much on the reasons behind her world changing, and that she avoids attaching herself to people. The latter is understandable, since no one remembers her the next day anyway, but this is already a clue as to the true demons haunting Trina, and why she is the person that she is. Her latching first onto Colin and then the gentle asylum manager Edie simmers with tension, as Trina struggles to bring herself to open up, be vulnerable, and try to face a forgotten past.

“And she really did feel like it might be okay. Okay the way it hadn’t been in months. There was something so trustworthy in Edie’s smile, in the gentle way she held out her hand toward the wide, curving staircase at the end of the lobby, that Trina might have been happy to follow her anywhere.”

If there is one flaw to I Contain Multitudes—and it is not a major one—it is that the fast-paced psychological thriller story limits the extent to which the characters and the worlds are developed. There is enough of each world to intrigue and want to explore it, but ultimately that isn’t the point.

This is all, of course, part of the point of the story, these shortcomings logical within the central thematic thrust. Trina’s emotional arc, her relationships with the likes of Colin and Dr. Sweets, and the particulars of the worlds she visits are neatly tied together. 

The novel’s theme might be relatively simple, but as my dad would say, “simple is beautiful.” The emotional core, the punch of the story, makes for an affecting read. Lovers of drama will appreciate the final resolution, and thriller fans get more than their money’s worth from the journey to the said ending. The heroine escapes into neither fantasy nor oblivion, but bravely begins the world anew.

Thank you for reading Victoria Lilly’s book review of I Contain Multitudes by Christopher Hawkins! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

The post Book Review: I Contain Multitudes by Christopher Hawkins appeared first on Independent Book Review.