For Blackburn, loss is a pet subject. She's a writer with a penchant for the sort of tales that kill the mood at a dinner party, edged with wit and pared down to the bones.
What follows is a brutal, weeklong tour of Coral's memories and losses told through the collision of three genre-bending narrative strands: Coral's fraying reality, the graphic novel she wrote, and a Greek chorus of artificial-intelligence librarians who decode the runes of civilization.