The Shamshine Blind envisions an alternate history in which Argentina won the Falklands War, a shift that might seem relatively unmomentous on the global scale, except that they won it by inventing, and then cornering the market on, a technology whereby specific types of dye induce specific emotions. Cerulean induces debilitating guilt; Slate Grey stops you from caring about anything, including your own safety; Deep Blue wipes your memory. During the larger wars that ensued, most of America’s major population centers were targeted and destroyed by Argentine psychopigment attacks, leaving cities like Miami and Boise (“the Big Potato”) as the major players and America living in, shall we say, reduced circumstances.
Of course, psychopigments aren’t exclusively used as weapons. The pharmaceutical industry moved in, creating profitable new pigments like Sunshine Yellow to address an international crisis of PTSD with regular doses of chemically induced happiness. Right behind the military-industrial complex and Big Pharma came the criminal underworld, selling real and fake psychopigments to serve as weapons, self-administered medication, and a way to pass the time in a grim and beaten-down America. It’s the job of the Psychopigment Enforcement Agency to curb the underground pigment trade and protect civilians and neurotypicals (more susceptible than the neurodivergent) from dangerously unregulated pigments.
We open on Agency employee Kay Curtida investigating reports that Shamshine, a dangerous imitation of Sunshine Yellow, is circulating on the streets of Daly City. If it comes to something, it could be the kind of case that makes her career—or rather, given her age (39) and the typical lifespan of people in her job (40s), gives her career the boost it needs to survive. She’s quickly pulled off the case in favor of investigating a suicide on the premises of a major pigment pharmaceutical company. No leads on that one. Certainly no promise of career advancement, except that her old school friend, a fancy R&D guy from fancy, fancy Boise, clues her in that there might be more to the suicide case than meets the eye.
If this feels like a lot of world to take in—well, it is. Pardo does yeoman’s work in administering the exposition in bite-sized doses throughout the first few scenes. It occasionally feels a skosh clunky for our heroine to be paging through old newspapers with helpfully informative headlines, or reproducing a workplace sign identifying the five original (and most important to the book) psychopigments. “This is a little much,” I said sniffily of the sign—but the joke was on me. After two fairly immediate failures to remember what emotional effect Magenta produced, I sheepishly tipped my mental hat to the author and her editor, and stuck a page flag on that page for the approximately twelve million times throughout the book it turned out I was going to need to reference it. (Magenta is obsession. It’s an important plot point. I am not a visual learner.)
The effort it took to immerse myself in Pardo’s world couldn’t have been more worth it. Once I knew the ropes, I was able to lose myself in the sheer fun of this book. At places the book veers close to horror (we’ll get to that), but the author’s infectious delight in the world she’s created shines through in every page. It’s just goddamn fun that Boise is the new big American city; that Argentina doesn’t bother with pharmaceutical uses for pigment because they’re all just in therapy all the time; that this world’s toxic positivity cult is led by a white American Christian who changed her name to Ananda Ashaji after spending time with a guru in India. Even when things are looking exceptionally bad for our heroes, Pardo will squeeze in some tiny dissonance from the real world that gives her setting that extra little pop of color (sorry! I had to!), while also making you feel like you’ve been let in on the loveliest kind of shared joke. I kept closing the book and looking around for someone to share the latest detail with, then remembering that, for it to be funny to another person, I’d have to first tell them all the stuff about the pigment warfare and the neuroprofiles and the Hope Depletion Events, and that would be kind of a long story just to get to the punchline that the fictional spy who assassinated Ronald Reagan during the war is now the Argentine ambassador to the US.
Within the mad, mad world Pardo has created, her story’s structure is comfortingly familiar. Kay Curtida is a classic noir protagonist, updated for the modern era by deleting misogyny from her emotional repertoire. She’s got a love interest who shows back up in her life offering leads and getting himself in trouble: her former schoolmate Doug Nambi, now a hotshot in the Agency’s Boise office. She’s got a tragic backstory: a father missing, presumed dead, in the Falklands War; a mother who refused to accept the reality of his loss; a beloved Agency mentor and father figure who, like all too many Agency staffers, died by suicide. And she’s got the most important noir hero quality of them all: that resentful, unconquerable decency, that stubborn refusal to give up and take the easy road. Of course the two crimes she’s investigating in the opening chapters are related. Of course it goes all the way to the top. That’s what we came here for.
If there’s a madcap quality to Kay’s adventures, as she careens from trap houses on the streets of a ruined San Francisco to a black-tie gala where she’ll rub elbows with the nation’s rich and powerful, it’s balanced out by the sheer horror that permeates this world. The gala is a charity auction to fund assisted living facilities for and regular meal delivery to the survivors of a particularly devastating psychopigment attack. Heading into San Francisco, Kay sees a sign that warns, NOW ENTERING MAGENTA TERRITORY. YOUR FEELINGS MAY NOT BE YOUR OWN.
That line, YOUR FEELINGS MAY NOT BE YOUR OWN, perfectly encapsulates the devastation that lies at the heart of this book. Pardo’s writing is fun and delightful, but that’s not all it is. Whimsical as it sometimes seems that brightly colored dyes have determined the fate of this alternate America, The Shamshine Blind compels readers to grapple with the cold realities of what that would actually look like. When Kay has a moment to catch her breath, it’s clear that she has never recovered from her mentor’s death—a loss she only knows how to manage through a boxed-up Grief Processing Journey™: Father, which plays a tape of affirmations while cycling through pigment-induced emotions. The Grief Processing Journey™ that ensues is an impeccably agonizing read—we feel the full weight of Kay’s loss and bewilderment—even as it’s darkly funny that the whole thing came out of a box.
Far worse than the Grief Processing Journey™ (I’m going to include that phrase as many times as I can because I love it) are the unregulated, weaponized emotions that may befall anyone at any moment. Everyone in this version of America knows to their sorrow that pigment attacks can happen at any time, carrying with them the threat that one’s entire self will be lost within moments. Deep Blue can wipe out not just all your memories, but your body’s very memory of how to pump blood through your veins. Magenta triggers an obsession that leads its victims to torch and dismember anyone who gets between them and the object of their devotion—and then to torch and dismember the idols themselves.
The sense that YOUR FEELINGS MAY NOT BE YOUR OWN must be keenly familiar to many who grapple with mental illness. It’s easy to recognize, intellectually, that the emotion consuming you does not align with reality; far harder to make your feelings fall in line with what you know to be true. Kay grapples with this all the time anyway, taking regular treatments of Sunshine Yellow to stay a few steps ahead of her depression. Agency employees get exposed to every color, to help them prepare and build defenses against pigment-induced emotions, so Kay has known for years that Slate Gray Ennui is her particular Achilles’ heel: “That Gray voice in my head, telling me everything I did was useless, flattened me with painful efficiency.” She has “no defenses against Ennui,” exactly because of how dramatically it enhances the specific flavor of her own depression.
Much as I identified with Kay’s internal fight to keep her head above water, I dearly wished she were a private investigator rather than a cop. For all of her cynicism, she is fundamentally committed to protecting the people of Daly City. There’s corruption in the higher levels of the Agency, as Kay learns, but her own office is full of decent people trying their best. Pardo is careful to distinguish the Agency from regular law enforcement, who have bigger budgets and easier lives, who look down on Kay and her fellow as “a bunch of gloomy loons,” and whose “incompetence” Kay says she has “cursed … for decades.” Still, and despite the care the author takes to illustrate that Daly City’s problems are systemic and institutional, the book still ends with Kay remaining in her job, and even with Doug joining her in Daly City. It feels of a muchness with our broader cultural apologia for law enforcement.
Still, if this is what Pardo gives us on her first time out, I can’t wait to see what she has in store for us next. The Shamshine Blind is a thoroughgoing good time, a book that manages to be a rollicking romp without sacrificing emotional depth. Sharp, clever, and bitingly original, it left me feeling like I’d injected a double dose of Sunshine Yellow Happiness.