Literary fiction
Kill Switch follows Dr. Bridget “Bird” Finch, a brilliant young cellist from a classical-music family who joins a working-class hardcore punk band in Michigan. She joined not to become a punk musician, but to study a musical world far removed from her classical training. When she hears the band’s young singer, Erin Cross, Bird recognizes an extraordinarily rare contralto voice and begins shaping the band’s music around what she believes that voice can accomplish. Over the next decade, Kill Switch evolves from a Michigan punk band into an influential industrial group, while Erin builds a life around music after believing a childhood Fontan procedure has freed her from the congenital heart defect she was born with. When her Fontan circulation begins to fail in the late 1980s, Erin and Bird respond to the narrowing future in profoundly different ways: Erin wants to spend the time she has living fully, while Bird becomes increasingly focused on what Erin’s voice might still be capable of creating. Erin dies two days after the completion of the band’s critically acclaimed album, Annifesto. Thirty-six years later, Bird, now a Yale music professor, agrees to revisit the band’s history with a documentarian, forcing her to confront the question at the heart of the story: Did Bird push Erin beyond her limits to create the music, or did Erin willingly give everything she had to create it?