Seven novels about only children

Kate McIntyre is an assistant professor of creative writing at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her story collection, Mad Prairie, is the winner of the 2020 Flannery O’Connor Award, selected by Roxane Gay, and was published by UGA Press in September 2021. Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals including Denver Quarterly, the Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and the Cimarron Review, and she is a recipient of residencies at Hambidge, Playa, and the Spring Creek Project. She has a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2014 and a Special Mention in the 2016 Pushcart Prize anthology. Previously the managing editor of the Missouri Review, she is now managing editor of the Worcester Review, a publication of the Worcester County Poetry Association.

At Electric Lit McIntyre tagged seven novels about "main characters with no siblings, but plenty of problems," including:

Depraved Indifference by Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana’s Depraved Indifference is third in a loose trilogy of true crime novels. The first two, Resentment and Three Month Fever, follow the parricidal Menendez brothers and Andrew Cunanan, killer of Gianni Versace, respectively. Depraved Indifference tracks two lesser-known miscreants, Sante and Kevin Kimes, who, fictionalized by Indiana, become Evangeline and Devin Slote.

If in Nothing to See Here, the only child Lillian is victim of her mother’s low expectations for her, in Depraved Indifference, Devin is his mother’s willing accomplice as she grifts her way across the country in a “circus of locomotion and calamity.” Though Devin lives without siblings, he is not technically an only child. He has a much younger brother, Darren, whom Evangeline stashes with various relatives so she can maintain her peripatetic agenda of passing bad checks, faking cancer, setting fires to collect insurance money, and abducting foreign workers to serve as unpaid servants at her homes. The bumper crop of crimes is hard to trace and prosecute, because Evangeline and Devin move so adeptly across jurisdictions. We hear little about Darren because he isn’t useful to Evangeline, and what we learn about Devin shows how lonely it is to grow up alone in the radioactive glow of a brilliant, toxic mother, and how easy it is for the son to follow in the mother’s crooked footsteps.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue