On Beagin's Duo

On Beagin's Duo: Pretend I'm Dead and Vacuum in the Dark

22 February 2026

My writing mentors, Andrea and Eric, recommended these reads after I finished (and loved) Beagin’s third book, Big Swiss. We had a conversation during my final MFA residency about how, over the course of all three novels, you can watch Beagin’s characters evolve as she grows as a writer—which was a fascinating concept to me, as a new writer myself. For sure, I was interested in witnessing such an evolution. For sure, I was going to read these books.

The facts that Beagin is 55 and holds an MFA from UC Irvine also endear her to me. If the math serves, this means she began her writing career at age 40, just a few measly years younger than me, and tracking other successful writers who began writing midlife, like me, gives hope.

Let me start out with what my husband calls BLUF (bottom line up front): I did not deeply enjoy Pretend I’m Dead, and rather deeply disliked Vacuum in the Dark. And as always, such a review necessitates investigation: why, halfway through Vacuum in the Dark, did I feel compelled to validate my dislike by reviewing all of its Goodreads one and two-star reviews?

Pretend I’m Dead was my preferred of the two. Mona, our protagonist, is in her mid-twenties, a former mental hospital resident (read traumatized), cleaning lady. She seems a bit lost, but not unhopeful, and entirely capable of love. The characters in this book are nicely varied; Mona meets all these people by cleaning their homes and develops layered experiences with each. My favorite character is Henry, and I will not spoil the plot here, but this character is probably himself worth the read.

In Pretend I’m Dead the plot advances in a way that feels meaningful. There are some delightful twists. Characters seem to benefit from engaging with one-another. The only true complaint I had about this book was that there seemed too little conflict between characters: no matter how much one character stepped on another’s’ toes, nobody ever seemed to get angry. It felt unnatural, but no big deal. Overall, the book was a fast read, quite funny, and in its bizarre characters, entertaining.

Vacuum in the Dark may be one of those that is determined a classic in 50-100 years’ time, but it fell completely flat for me for a few reasons.

First, the book seemed to wallow in and almost showcase all things crass. Perhaps it is a foreshadowing of the tenor of the rest of the novel that the first page opens with Mona finding a shit in her client’s soap dish. I think…that perhaps it is incumbent upon me to thank Beagin for obliterating some of the taboos of both culture and literature by choosing a housekeeper as a main character so that she might unveil the basest aspects of humanity. There must be some value in that—and frankly, it parallels the tampon scene in Miranda July’s All Fours. I should be grateful for this, and yet I found much of what is crass and disgusting in this novel difficult to read, difficult to digest. It felt like crassness for crassness’s sake and often left a sour taste in my mouth.

Another aspect of this book that frustrated me was its lack of true conflict. While, yes, there are sex and betrayal and incest and assault, it deeply frustrated me that none of the characters ever got truly upset about any of these behaviors—Mona least of all, although she was often the victim. This is not my experience in life, and it does not feel true to life. Even just two days ago I had a misunderstanding and disagreement with one of my own kiddos that left us both furious for hours before either of us was willing to talk and resolve the issue. Why does nobody ever get angry in Beagin’s books? Why do they all always simply accept what’s happening as though it’s totally ok? It seems unnatural.

Which leads me to Mona as a flat character. Yes, Mona has a lot going on, for sure, but her approach to life and response to all the things that happen to her feel unexplored, untouched, and therefore she does not appear to evolve over time. To me, there’s nothing worse than a character without an arc because without an arc there is nothing to wish for, to strive for. Indeed, as readers, we cannot ever be truly sure what Mona wants and needs in this book—critical aspects of character development in fiction. She seems to want/need her mother, with all the references in the first third of the book to milk, breasts, and breastfeeding. But then those references sort of evaporate, and afterward she seems to want/need a better version of her father, and seems to be trying to find it through every relationship with every man in her life (and yes, every single man in her life, except her stepfather Frank, wants to have sex with her—most women, too—which felt disingenuous). Yet in the end, she doesn’t successfully find a father figure, either. Maybe what she truly needs is identity and she finds that through art? Maybe that explains the ending? I don’t know. Maybe all this uncertainty is quite true to a 27-year-old; as a fiction writer, I just wish it were a bit clearer to the reader.

One reason Mona’s wants and needs may be unclear to the reader is because the narrative episodes of this novel run on endlessly, one spectacle after another, much like the “infinite scroll” of our preferred social medias: X, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, etc. They say sensitives like me can get PTSD from the trauma of “infinite scroll,” and that feels apropos here: some of Mona’s experiences are most certainly traumatic, but she’s given too little time to process them before the next episode/event occurs. Someone recently reviewed Emerald Fennel’s “Wuthering Heights” as smooth-brained, and I’d give Vacuum in the Dark that same assessment. The reader, just as the protagonist, is given no opportunity to process anything that’s happening, which feels like an emphasis on spectacle, entertainment, over depth.

Again, perhaps in 50-100 years, the style of this novel will be considered cutting-edge for the time. People will likely applaud it.

However, I am currently of the headspace that our culture is moving too much toward fast and furious overconsumption that forces oversimplification and minimalization of complex concepts, and that media such as this only reinforce those norms, that trend. For my own part, I’d like to contribute writing that slows things down and leads readers to inspect a narrower life at greater depth—to maximize the simple. Magnify the micro. Invite people to live an inspected life.

Therefore, these books were not really for me.