RON CURRIE, We Will See You Bleed. New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 2026. ISBN: 9780593851692
Review essay by Joan Vermette
The second volume in Ron Currie's Babs Dionne trilogy, We Will See You Bleed, extends his imaginative rendering of the Franco-American community in a fictionalized Waterville, Maine. It is a prequel to The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, released (and reviewed by Résonance) last year.
Set against the backdrop of a fictional 1984 paper mill strike, We Will See You Bleed tracks twenty-nine-year-old Babs Dionne's transformation from a local union leader into the matriarch of a local drug ring. As the economic devastation of the year-long strike pushes her working-class Franco-American community to the brink of survival, Babs steps into a vacuum of multi-institutional failures, confiscating products from neighboring Lewiston’s drug lord, Harold Aucoin, and selling them to financially sustain her people as the strike wears on.
Yet, as Currie transitions from the allegorical playground of the first novel into the grounded, gritty mechanics of a historical labor strike and crime drama, the narrative encounters a fundamental reality problem. Some of it is a matter of genre—farce, speculative fiction, historical fiction, and the gangster drama all pulling at once, so that it's not always clear where to suspend our disbelief or where to place our faith. But the deeper problem is one of omission: this is a book that shortcuts the complex internal lives of its characters, decentering its central matriarch for the sake of a plot device rather than giving us the real, three-dimensional woman the story demands.
It is precisely because Currie demonstrates such a profound capacity for atmosphere, action scenes, and character sketches that these shortcuts feel so jarring. His signature strengths as a stylist are fully on display early on. The book's pacing is masterful, using sharp, rhythmic jumps between different character perspectives and actions to keep the narrative moving with measured momentum. We meet unforgettable characters—from the inept chainsaw-wielding thug sent by Aucoin through Babs’s husband, Rhéal (fully alive in this novel, though we met his ghost in the first), to the Saucier brothers, master craftsmen of terror with accents redolent of both of my pépères. It's against that backdrop of real craft that the book's central omission stands out.
The first thing a reader can expect from the second book of a trilogy is backstory, but here the promise of a prequel goes mostly unfulfilled. Predominantly, what's missing is the education of Babs—the mechanism by which a traumatized, impulsive fourteen-year-old becomes a woman capable of leading a union local in a male-dominated industry,1 and through that tutelage, capable of running a drug empire. Instead, the Prélude hands her the leadership reins outright: a ghost in her kitchen, her dead mother, tells her that her people need her to lead and that leading will require the capability for violence she first discovered the night she killed her rapist.
The mastermind of the 1987 Jay paper mill strike on which Currie based his Waterville strike was Peter Kellman, a formidable strategist and organizer who helped build the resistance into a statewide social movement.2 In 1987, Kellman was 41 years old, carrying a decades-long resume of rigorous activism in the Civil Rights movement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. He was a seasoned anti-war organizer, and a union scholar who had spent the late 1970s systematically unionizing shoe factories. So where did Babs get her training in union leadership in the ten years between when she returned from the convent and the twenty-nine-year-old at the start of this book—such that the economic survival of her community rests solely on her still-young shoulders?
The loss is not only of realism—and of the reader's trust—but of a narrative opportunity. There's so much scope for more story here—Babs's ascendance within the male-dominated paper mill at a time when female union leaders were virtually nonexistent would be interesting to see—but Currie doesn't give it to us. Instead, the reason why Babs is leading the strike is because Babs is Babs: a superhero from the outset.
The second thing that shook my faith in the novel's reality is the entire storyline about Babs's pregnancy. That Babs could hide a pregnancy from her husband and her neighbors in a tight-knit Franco-American community defined by deep, observant networks and unusually high birthrates feels truly improbable. And yet in Chapter Four (pp. 67–68), we see Babs's friends learn about her nausea, observe a change in her, and even though one friend had already had three pregnancies of her own, they somehow don't put these thoughts together. This scene—as are so many of the scenes with Babs's extended gang, in this book and in the first—is played for humor. But it feels as though that joke is on the reader, elbowed in the ribs with broad hinting and made complicit in ignoring female Franco reality.
The reason for this artificial secrecy lies in the book's plot architecture. The entire tragic structure of the novel is based on a calculated contrary motion: as Babs's criminal empire rises, her marriage dissolves. This dissolution occurs precisely because she’s hidden the pregnancy, slipping away from her bodyguard — her husband's best friend, Claude—to attend an appointment for an abortion. Left in the dark, her husband Rhéal suffers a crisis of profound distrust, falsely believing his best friend has handed Babs over to their enemies. Rhéal executes Claude for disloyalty; the marriage never recovers from this. To make this tragic domino effect work, Currie must choose to make the pregnancy remain a hidden plot device. Therefore, all of Babs's inner thinking about her choice is forced completely offline for a "big reveal" at the climax in Chapter 16 that is ultimately no reveal at all. The cost of this structural manipulation is devastating. By banishing Babs's complex moral and spiritual struggle to the dark, Currie inadvertently forces the reader's gaze into Rhéal's eyes, and Babs is decentralized in her own origin story. Her reproductive capabilities and bodily autonomy are reduced to plot devices, silent gears engineered solely to manufacture male tragedy.
Currie could have made other choices. He could have let us into Babs's psyche through her consultation with Father Clement, which currently happens entirely offline. That scene, given room, could have done real work: a portrait of honest spiritual counsel, standing in sharp contrast to the novel's other subplot, the Church's cover-up of child abuse. Instead, we get neither Babs's interiority nor that contrast—only the fact of a visit we're told about after it's already over. That contrast might also have let the novel earn what it currently just assumes: a Franco women's network—mothers, friends, neighbors—whose collective knowledge is usually sharper, not blinder, than what the plot requires of it here. Instead, it remained Schrödinger's pregnancy—something the reader did know and didn't know—which left this reader feeling used and incredulous.
There are other breakdowns of the readerly contract in this book. While the transporting of 1980s Franco culture to 2016 in the first book felt empowering and transgressive—a speculative leap—here in the 1980s, anachronisms stand out. A suede chair passed off as Babs's grandmother's heirloom, decades before working-class families could afford suede upholstery. The word "asshat," dropped into the scene where the strikers gather to march on the mill, years before the internet invented it. Poutine served up as though it were already Maine diner fare, when it wouldn't reach that status for another two decades.
And then, there are editing and continuity problems in the text. The mill's sulfurous air, described in nearly identical language once in the Prélude and again in the Two-Cent Bridge scene, feels not like a callback but a draft echo—the kind of thing a final line-edit should have caught. Father Clement's guilt over endangering the children of Waterville by supporting the strike against the Archbishop's orders, given to us plainly on page 209, is handed back to us fifty pages later as his first realization of it. These problems compound, pushing readers to check facts and account for contradictions until we are pushed outside the dream of the story altogether.
I keep returning to the speed with which this book was written and to how early we learned the trilogy had been picked up by Netflix; both the prequel and the series were announced at the time of the first novel's release. That timeline has me thinking less about Currie's narrative choices and more about story itself, and particularly what parts of a story actually survive translation from literary text to our television or movie screens. Premise and fictional universe transfer across formats; sentence-level fidelity does not. An ethnically-specific grandmother running a drug empire is a premise that survives translation to television intact. The missing fifteen years of Babs's life that would make her assumption of power believable—the slow, sentence-by-sentence work of earning a reader's belief — belong to the text itself, not to the premise, and text is exactly what doesn't carry over. If that's true, then the novel's omission isn't the end of the story. It's an opening. Those fifteen years are still available to be written—just not here.
If transmedia storytelling is truly Currie’s aim here,3 then my hope shifts rather than disappears. I hope the Duffer Brothers give these characters the room on screen that this book didn't give them on the page — room to build both character and world with real fidelity. I will take that trade— book for series — on one condition: that the series holds itself to Franco reality, especially Franco women's reality, more faithfully than this middle book has done.
For the mémère-as-mob-boss trope was never really about crime. It was always a speculative answer to a harder question: what would it have looked like if Francos had fought back more, if our né.e.s pour un petit pain meekness had broken sooner? We never built our own model of that kind of defiance, so Currie borrows one from other cultures to attempt an answer — but the borrowing that makes his speculation possible also threatens to erase the very people the question belongs to.
Therefore, the analogy at the heart of "mémère-as-mob-boss" was precarious from the outset. We Will See You Bleed leans harder into the boss, until Babs nearly disappears, her leadership handed to her by a ghost, her pregnancy handed to Rhéal's gaze. Currie owes us a rebalancing, back toward Babs's character and the culture she comes from. Whether there's still time or will to make that happen — in the last novel, or on screen — is the question I'm left with.
Notes
Women in local union leadership were measured at less than 5% in the 1980s – see https://www.ueunion.org/ue-news-feature/2024/fifty-years-ago-union-women-founded-new-organization-to-fight-for-equality
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kellman and https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/sd-warren/37/
On transmedia storytelling, see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006), and Jenkins, "Transmedia Storytelling 101," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 21, 2007, http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html.