Wrapping one’s head around Ivy Pochoda’s subversive “Sing Her Down” isn’t easy. There are times one wonders whether the multilayered story Ms. Pochoda unspools is worth following to its surreal conclusion. Fortunately, brave and brilliant writing and the dynamic tension in the relationship at the heart of the book are absorbing — and a reward in the end.

Billed as a feminist Western, this apocalyptic fiction, written during and shadowed by the pandemic, focuses on Florence “Florida” Baum and Diosmary “Dios” Sandoval, cellmates in an Arizona women’s prison.

There are reasons both are in jail, just as there are reasons Dios is the alpha female in their furious, symbiotic relationship. This novel is, above all, about rage and violence. It ends (no spoiler alert) in “High Noon” fashion. It is ornery and it can be shocking.

Ms. Pochoda serves up the following image of the brutal and fearsome Dios after she dares Florida to hurt a particularly vulnerable inmate, then takes the matter into her own cruel hands. The victim is the mountainous, passive Mel-Mel.

(As TV anchors reporting another mass shooting too often say these days, these images might be disturbing.)

“Florida imagines the sound of ripping flesh like tearing fabric, a gruesome pop-pop of stitches bursting. But she can’t hear it over Mel-Mel’s brief scream, which is quickly muffled as Dios covers her mouth with her free hand. Then she twists the fork, twirling the shredded flesh into a mangled spiral.”

Fill in the picture at your leisure. Or not. It makes you ask whether Ms. Pochoda’s goal is to celebrate or deplore violence; she seems to relish exploring it. One of her talking points — and concerns — seems to be whether women are as capable of and efficient at it as men. This book argues they are.

The plot accelerates when a quirk of fate frees both women. Florida aims to return home to Los Angeles to resume a semi-normal life, driving her Jag on the freeways. As for Dios, the end-point is not so clear.

On a bus to Los Angeles packed with immigrants, Florida and herself, Dios murders a corrections officer. That death, like others referenced in this novel’s complicated backstory, exacerbates the relationship between Florida and Dios, her antagonist. It also becomes a case for Los Angeles cops Lobos and Easton, and quickly the novel takes on some of the qualities of a police procedural.

A book of multiple viewpoints, “Sing Her Down” accumulates profound urban layering as Florida reacquaints herself with Los Angeles as the policewoman Lobos searches the city’s netherworld to find and punish her estranged, abusive husband. Lobos’s relationship with her professional partner, a man named Easton, becomes yet another exploration of violence, Ms. Pochoda’s overriding topic.

Here, Lobos surveys Skid Row:

“Now every lot, corner, and walkway harbors the tents that are no longer just tents but block-long shanties, elaborate structures of tarps and chairs, cookstoves, grills, repurposed office furniture, plywood boards, wiring jacked from lampposts and car batteries. Cars turned into micro-apartments: kitchen, storage locker, bedroom all-in-one. Cars that haven’t moved in years, that are burdened until their axles break. Cars that are sinking into the street until they become part of it. Cars that are burned and then abandoned.”

Urban anomie joins violence (and perhaps generates it) as a topic on which Ms. Pochoda can wax poetic. That first glimpse of Skid Row, with cars turned into homes, is positively Whitmanesque. Its accretion is rhythmic and mesmerizing.

“Sing Her Down” ends with the description of a mural that seems to memorialize the final interaction of Dios and Florida. People swear they see the mural move, that the mural is alive. So is this challenging, singular novel.

Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer in Cleveland.

First Published: May 27, 2023, 9:30 a.m.