Say My Name is an interesting blend of true crime fiction and somewhat autobiographical fiction. Clifford writes of an author who, post-divorce, has returned to his childhood home to teach a summer session at a local university. When the job falls through and two girls disappear from a mall a few towns away, he begins researching/writing a true crime story, trying to connect their disappearance with that of two girls, fifteen-year-old Annabelle and Ana Rodgers, who disappeared from a mall when he was fifteen. The older case remains unsolved. The author, whose name remains unknown throughout, had his first crush on one of the girls.
This book intrigued me from the beginning. The list of potential suspects in the little town is vast: everyone from the local sexual predator to the author’s kindly elderly uncle to everyone present at the mall on that fateful day, including childhood friends of the author, and there are plenty of red herrings to keep the reader intrigued.
From the onset with the author’s note, it’s hard to tell how much of the actual author is part of the fictional author, which is an interesting idea. It becomes even more interesting when the fictional author’s therapist wonders if he is not a character in another author’s book, sort of a meta-author. The protagonist, like many of Clifford’s main characters, is a rough-around-the-edges, self-destructive guy dealing with emotional and physical problems and addictions of one sort or another, but the meta-fiction aspect raises it above Clifford’s usual works.
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Say My Name (Square Tire Books, May 9, 2023) is available through:
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You can read my review of Clifford’s newest A Moth to Flame here.
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