Izzy Von’s New Novella, 'Six Is My Name', Is Unflinching Look Into Life's Abyss

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

—Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Growing up can be hard. Childhood is often depicted in media as a period of perfect innocence and carefree joy. And, ideally, it should be. But reality, unfortunately, is often much darker. For some, growing up is a battleground of physical, mental, emotional, and sometimes sexual abuse, in the worst case scenarios inflicted by parents or other close relatives whom a child should be able to trust.

For abuse survivors, such violations invariably lead to lifelong trauma, and few depictions of that trauma are as vivid and unrelenting as in the latest novella from author Izzy Von, Six Is My Name. The story follows Cyndi, a trans girl growing up in mid-to-late ‘80’s Texas. From a young age, Cyndi has had to endure the abuse of her violently bigoted father, who routinely roughs Cyndi up for being ‘queer’. After a particularly savage beating leaves Cyndi with serious injuries, she’s sent to live with her uncle Richie and aunt Valery, who run a biker bar in the state’s rural boonies. Far from offering respite, Richie and Valery prove to be more intolerant of Cyndi than even her parents. Cyndi quickly becomes close with her cousin Bonnie, bonding over music while living in her trailer behind the bar. Bonnie alone supports Cyndi's true self, but after meeting some of Bonnie’s friends, including charming local teen Buck, Cyndi learns that Buck supports her, too, and that his interest in her might not be strictly platonic.

The bad, however, outweighs the good once Cyndi learns that Richie and Valery’s bar is a front for a child sex-trafficking and pornography ring and that Bonnie has been continually drugged and molested by an ever-widening client base that includes everyone from bikers to businessmen. After stabbing Richie in the shoulder, Cyndi likewise becomes victimized, and the abuse only ends when Bonnie and Cyndi steal Valery’s truck and attempt suicide as a means of escape. Failing to die, Cyndi drifts to Austin, Texas, where the story picks up some years later; Cyndi has established herself as a featured dancer at a club using hormones acquired from a shady doctor to fully transition into a woman. It’s there that she encounters Buck, now a college student and member of a comedy troupe, and the two embark on the relationship they left behind as teens. Yet just as things start to look brighter, life throws Cyndi a final obstacle, one she may not survive.

Staring into the same black mirror as Von’s previous novella, the first-person zombie opus Died, Six Is My Name shares the former’s overwhelmingly nihilistic tone if not its genre. On one level Six can be interpreted as a perverse coming-of-age story; Von, a trans woman author, channels first-hand experience into the tale, and her prose here is the most intense it’s ever been, hitting with sledgehammer force in scenes more horrifying than any Stephen King offering, and for good reason. Stock horror figures like vampires, zombies, and werewolves, no matter how frighteningly portrayed, are ultimately fictitious creatures, but the grotesque actions inflicted by human monsters against innocents is both undeniably real and sadly commonplace.

That’s not to say Six is perfect. If there’s one frustrating aspect, it’s the fact that, after enduring so much maltreatment alongside Cyndi and Bonnie, readers are denied seeing Richie and Valery’s comeuppance when it finally arrives. Von instead only hints at their ultimate fates in a throwaway sentence late in the book. It’s an infraction against one of fiction writing’s core rules, ‘Show, Don’t Tell’, though perhaps in denying the audience’s need for catharsis Von is simply further emphasizing her overall thematic point: Life Sucks.

Bleak, visceral, unforgiving, and unerring in execution, Six Is My Name manages to be at once both undeniably ugly and strikingly beautiful. While certainly not for the faint of heart, Von’s latest is backed up by earnest storytelling and a suitably uncompromising ending that more than earns a 4 (Out of 5) on my Fang Scale. The author has already announced a sequel set to arrive later this year, and it will be interesting to see where she takes the story from here.