The Demise of Alice: A New Book from Dissolve Publishing

The Demise of Alice (dissolve publishing, 2024); Book cover, photograph by Judd Dunning.

Dissolve is pleased to share the release of our most recently printed book, The Demise of Alice by Evelyn Grace Vex. Vex is the pen name of Grace Hannah Perez, an author and artist from Southern California. The novel was edited by Christopher Squier and Jackie Valle and published by Dissolve in hardcover in February 2024.

The Demise of Alice is a noir mystery set against the backdrop of New Orleans in the late 1920s. The narrative commences with an unexpected death, a man the reader encounters only to see him fall victim to the novel’s formidable protagonist Alice. The bulk of the novel’s narrative follows Alice in deciphering the meaning of this event through her own complicit investigation and cover-up of the crime—and the complications that ensue.

Alice is the daughter of a known mobster, the infamous Benjamin W., whose own occult practices seem to drive many of Alice’s most destructive impulses. Following Alice’s first act of murder, a blending of victim and perpetrator draws the novel into territory reminiscent of the guilt-ridden narrators of Crime and Punishment or The Tell-Tale Heart, yet with a specificity unique to its author: here, our protagonist is a painfully thin fifteen-year-old girl, at once a tenacious detective and femme fatale. 

Early on in the novel, Alice remarks that the concept of time has always baffled her. She wonders how time was invented, placing her father’s pocket watch in the freezer “so I could stop time.” As the plot progresses, we find ourselves, like Alice, wrestling with the fine distinctions between fate and context, agency and inheritance, and the inevitable consequences and unconscious motivations behind the actions we wish we could avoid. 

We invite you to pick up a copy of this intriguing novel and immerse yourself in the desire to stop time and hold onto the purest moments of the past for just a little longer. We hope you enjoy diving into the novel’s rich imagery, observation, and fabulation.

Dissolve extends our gratitude to the family of Grace Hannah Perez, especially to her parents Angela Cordova Dunning and Judd Dunning and her sister Ava Perez, for their generosity, support, and trust with Perez’s manuscript. To Natasha Lake, we share our deep thanks for loaning your copy of Perez’s original, self-published edition. It has been an honor to memorialize Perez and steward this indelible project.

The book is available for purchase either by visiting the link below or by contacting us directly via the contact form on this page (see your sidebar or footer): 

Purchase: The Demise of Alice by Grace Hannah Perez

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