Agnes, We're Not Murderers! Book Review

by Catalina Bonati

2/5 stars ★★☆☆☆

Agnes, We’re Not Murderers! by Jessica Alexander (to be published June 16, 2026) is a short, experimental novel about the spectre of Mary and her haunting of Agnes, a manor, a convent, and an inn. It takes place in an ambiguous Gothic European setting.

The book is written in an experimental form that takes its inspiration from Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Some of the text is written in red rather than black, and there are footnotes in most pages that refer to other parts of the story, or at times are separate unrelated anecdotes told by an unknown narrator. The footnotes often point to future and past events in the book. This kind of text is preferably read in print, as it is too interactive to be comfortable in EPUB format. Additionally, the footnotes which refer to other pages are not linked, therefore must be manually looked up and this is tiresome to do. The phrases which have footnotes are highlighted in red, but there are some sentences which have no footnote and have no particular relevance yet are highlighted in red anyway, which is confusing. Some footnotes also seem misplaced, as they do not depict anything relevant to its referent. The writer of the footnotes is unknown, and their relation to the story is unexplained as well. It is unclear whether the anecdotes told in the footnotes are meant to build up a continuous story like in House of Leaves, as they don’t seem related to either the text itself or to each other.

The writing style is clunky and disjointed. Sometimes it seems as if sentences don’t follow each other in sequence, which is frustrating to read and keeps the story ambiguous. Its style is rather modern-classic, a bit like Graham Greene’s style of writing. The plot is never in focus; rather, the focus is on the stylistic telling of the story than on its content. I was never sure what the plot exactly was, as nothing was ever truly explained (it was only ever referenced in a footnote to another part of the story, which also did not explain what was happening). This novel is also billed as a lesbian story, yet there is no lesbian in sight. In theory, Agnes is haunted by a ghost named Mary, who she never met in life, and she is shunned by her family and they are all cursed. However, there is no yearning, no love, and no attraction, and are just two separate characters without any strong connection. They both hate men for their own reasons, but for me, this is not enough to be labelled as a “lesbian story.” If anything, this is the story of toxic men and not of women.

The plot of this story is not at all clear. The writing style is confusing and vague and the storyline really needs some work. It is commendable that the author plays with the structure of the novel form and its inspiration is clear. However, its execution falls flat. Even though the book is short, it feels much too long, since for much of the story it seems as if nothing is happening because nothing is clear.

Overall, this book is recommended to those who enjoy novels that play with structure, and those who like Gothic style without any substance.