Strike Me Down, by Mindy Mejia
In works of fiction that might be considered “sports fiction,” sport serves a particular purpose in the story. It can be the force that propels the plot forward (The big game is coming) or the source of the drama itself (Will they make it to the championship? Will they win?). Sport can offer the setting, a nuanced world and culture in which other dramas unrelated to the sport play out. Finally, and perhaps the fan favorite among the baseball literature set, sport can be the bearer of metaphor, illuminating a story’s themes and embodying its questions and obsessions. In Strike Me Down, the latest novel from Mindy Mejia, the sport of kickboxing does indeed provide the central metaphor, but it also functions as a tool for characterization. As both combat sport and high-dollar entertainment business, kickboxing is a maul, cleaving apart the central characters’ civilized selves from their baser desires, exposing a raw edge and forcing them to face truths about themselves and each other.
Forensic accountant Nora Trier has made a career—and a life—out of being as independent as possible. Nora’s tidy principles are tested when Gregg Abbott walks into her firm with a twenty-million-dollar problem: The hugely successful company Gregg has built with his business partner and wife, the legendary kickboxer Logan Russo, is about to host a kickboxing tournament with the largest-ever purse, but the prize money has gone missing. Nora is no stranger to tracking down vanished money, but what she isn’t prepared for is how she becomes entangled with both Gregg and Logan and must struggle to keep her personal and professional lives in their separate corners.
Strike Me Down is not sports fiction, nor does it intend to be. Over the course of the story, we spend little time inside an actual kickboxing ring, but we don’t need to be there. Much more compelling is what’s happening inside each point of view character’s internal ring as they grapple with themselves and the pressures upon them. The story is told from multiple points of view with calculated intention. Each point of view character and their respective voice adds to the narrative and pulls at the threads of the vanished money, by turns unraveling the mystery and tightening the knot. Thanks to incendiary bedfellows trust and betrayal, the story sweats with tension.
Perhaps where sport serves this story best is in the context it provides for the powerful female characters, particularly Logan Russo. When we meet her, Logan is already a force, the undisputed queen of her fitness kingdom. Right away, we know this isn’t Million Dollar Baby; this is kickboxing’s G.O.A.T. A more familiar narrative in sports fiction (and nonfiction) is the one in which the female athlete must struggle to have the chance to play or prove her worth in a sport dominated by men. Her gender identity is an obstacle she must overcome, not a mere adjective in her characterization like it is for Logan Russo in Strike Me Down. While women competing in combat sports pushes against societal norms differently than women competing in, say, soccer or tennis, we can accept as plausible a world in which a fifty-year-old former kickboxing champion has amassed a devoted following and an enormous fortune in the fitness market. Nora Trier, too, is in a position of power as a highly successful partner at a forensic accounting firm. It’s both the given-ness of the characters’ professional power and the nature of their collision that adds an intriguing subplot to the expected playing-out of the whodunit and why-it-was-done.
I was eager to read Strike Me Down and gladly set aside a heavy work of nonfiction to dive into it. During this COVID-19 pandemic, it’s not surprising that many of us have sought fiction in the form of novels, TV series, and movies for a break from the circumstances and uncertainties of real life. Then again, fiction has always provided a satisfying departure from the particular, overly familiar complexities of our own lives to experience someone else’s conflicts and risks. Incidentally, this is what watching sports does for us too. We get to immerse ourselves in a narrative that matters in the moment but does not affect our daily lives, livelihoods, or relationships in any real way. (Let me be the one to tell you that exceptions to this assertion do exist, but that’s a different essay.) Sports, like works of fiction, provide an emotional pay-off without the real-life stakes.
But Mejia’s fiction does not let us off the hook easily, and that’s why I enjoy it. There is no such thing as an uncomplicated relationship in her stories. In each of her previous three novels, Leave No Trace (Emily Bestler/Atria, 2018), Everything You Want Me to Be (Emily Bestler/Atria, 2017), and The Dragon Keeper (Ashland Creek Press, 2012), Mejia draws complex characters and lets them crash into each other in complicated, sometimes taboo ways. These relationships ratchet up the stakes and, in many cases inspire some deliciously questionable decision-making.
Strike Me Down offers its fair share of flawed, complicated characters and sets them up to square off in unexpected ways. “We all have a fight inside us,” Gregg Abbott declares in a well-honed soliloquy early in the story. We’re inclined to believe him, and we read on for the thrill of finding out what each character is fighting for and what drives their fight.
Carlee Tressel Alson is the author of the forthcoming book Blair: An American Evolution, which tells the story of a steel mill in western Pennsylvania and the family that has kept it running for one hundred years. Her essay “Liminal State,” which is and isn’t really about sports either, appears in the second edition of Car Bombs and Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology (Belt, 2020). She lives and farms with her family in rural northwest Indiana.