All Activity

Assignment 1: Act of Story Statement To save humanity aboard the spaceship Igaia Assignment 2: The Antagonist Senator Aules sponsored Guadalupé to join the ruling Corporation’s religious Order. Her meteoric success is a point of both pride and envy for him. The Senator is the architect of a secret Corporation plan to enslave the farming community who joined Igaia to escape oppression on Earth. When Sister Guadalupé learns she has been his unwitting accomplice, she must face the true nature of their relationship and the mission. Aules reports to Patron Jones, the charming Elite funder of Igaia’s mission, virtually present on board via Walker Jones. Neurological alterations and implants allow Walkers to link to their Patrons, so that the reclusive ultra-rich can experience what their Walkers do. Guadalupé has ‘served’ Patron Jones regularly through Walker Jones, and has strong affection for both. When Aules’ secret plot is revealed, we learn that the Patron has a contingency plan to destroy Igaia and all on board, thus enabling a new narrative on Earth in which the Patron is the hero who safely disposed of Earth's greatest enemies. Revealed now as the greater antagonist, the Patron sexualizes the countdown, demanding Guadalupé’s presence as he links to his heartbroken Walker, to extract the ‘Ultimate Gift’ climax at the moment of death. Assignment 3: Breakout Title Dea ex Machina Hymn to our Stars I, Gaia Assignment 4: Genre and Comparables Genre: Sci-Fi In a bold sound byte: Beyoncé’s Run the World (Girls) meets Brave New World, an eco-feminist 2001: A Space Odyssey Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki Similar in bringing to life complex characters, centering women and LGBTQ+, driven by love and adventure and conspiring to help each other in impossible circumstances and a speculative context - whose joyous, page-turning story also invites us to forgive and better ourselves and our society. Cloud Cuckooland by Anthony Doerr Similar themes of future climate crisis and institutional/governmental use of technology to ‘get us through’ the trauma of a dystopian future, with a story of surprising hope driven by complex, highly intelligent characters willing to sacrifice for love, our planet, our future and as atonement. Assignment 5: Hook Line (logline) Spiritual leader to a colony bound for a distant planet, Sister Guadalupé must face the truth that her religion has been weaponized to impose the destructive social order that is dooming humanity. Assignment 6: Inner Conflict and Secondary Conflict Inner Conflict Sister Guadalupé is a High Priestess of the Order, pop-star meets preacher meets sex worker in the new religion of ‘self love’. Kind and friendly, she struggles with the selfishness her role is intended to promote. She believes in the tenet of Free Love, and wrestles with the degradation she feels in some contexts of this ‘service’. Lupé has been admonished for her intellectual pursuits and reprimanded for pushing the boundaries of spiritual-societal concepts of the Order. Igaia’s mission gives the priestess the freedom to live into her potential and beliefs, more than she expects or may be ready for. Scenario 1: We meet Senator Aules As Guadalupé revels in the spectacular journey through space and in meeting the ship’s crew on the bridge, Senator Aules arrives and interrupts. He jovially insists on a hug, while Sister Guadalupé is ‘intensely aware of the crew's eyes on them, as she was of the Senator's hand sliding rapidly down her back to a less avuncular position. The priestess skillfully slipped back and held the older man's hands at arm's length, masking the defensive move with a coquettish smile.’ Lupe tries but ultimately fails to cover her embarrassment at his repeated broadcasting of sexual and social ownership of her. They leave together, taking a circuitous public route, his ‘pet priestess on parade’, as usual. In the end, she’s grateful for the extra time for her Service Pill to take effect, so that by the time they reach his chambers, she’s ready and willing to service him as expected. Secondary Conflict People all around Lupé underestimate and demean her because of her appeal and her role in the very religion they all subscribe to. Whether it’s Aules treating her like his property, Lieutenant Kali assuming she has no understanding of science or technology and is a tool of the Corporation at best, or the Patron angrily reprimanding her for daring to think she has the ability to understand much less the status to question the plans of the Corporation. Yet Guadalupé, to a fault, responds by trying to connect, however she can. Scenario 2: Kali uncovers a sinister connection Lieutenant Kali is a top coder with the Military Protectors, on board with a tight group of friends and a Captain she’d follow anywhere. Following the trail of barely detectable aberrant code, Kali and her friend Will uncover Aules’ plot and a connection in it to Guadalupé. Immediately suspicious, Kali then stumbles upon Lupé leaving Will’s quarters. Spurred on by jealousy, the coder ignores facts and gaps in data to assume that Guadalupé is a collaborator in the plot with Aules. Assignment 7: The Incredible Importance of Setting Dea ex Machina opens with an unattributed letter to an unidentified friend. In it, the writer proclaims, ‘The Mars colony failed. Catastrophically. This is the truth the world must believe.’ Our story begins some twenty years later, aboard the first interplanetary colonization expedition since. On Earth, humans live in an Epoch of Distance, characterized by an extreme caste system, with the reclusive ultra-rich Elite at the top. In the words of Creator Duanna, ‘We looked away as laws were re-written to turn billionaires to trillionaires, and the rest of humanity to an indentured workforce. We cleaved that caste chasm with our own labor, feeding it with our colonized data and debt and selling our voices in government. Elected officials and judges became corporate hires. Pop stars became sex idols, sex became religion, and religion married business. Together they embraced and excelled at disseminating opiates to the masses of the ever poorer global working class. Daily life went on. And the earth was slowly consumed.’ Our story occurs on board the spaceship Igaia, transporting a complete colony and all necessary equipment to a distant planet, to begin the extraction of fuel resources desperately needed back on Earth. Among the passengers, the Agrarians aim to learn from terraforming the new planet so that they can return to Earth with new advancements in adaptive regeneration. The Corporate Senators speak in other rooms of the planet as a possible new home for humanity, should efforts to rehabitize Earth to our needs fail. Igaia is the AI running the eponymous ship, in partnership with its inventor, Creator Duanna. The spaceship’s adaptive intelligence, revolutionary regenerative fuel use, and iterative well-care for passengers, all while moving beyond the speed of light, make the expedition possible. We learn that the AI was born of necessity, designed by Duanna to save her own life. The two function symbiotically, as both aggressively evolve. Duanna wrote our opening letter, and at the moment of crisis and opportunity on the ship, she exposes the annihilation of the Mars colony by the Corporation. In the final chapters of the book, we discover that Duanna secretly assembled her most beloved people on Igaia, so that they all might escape Earth to create a new kind of society.

At Night Court one Christmas, John Larroquette gave me a sofa pillow embroidered with: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Larroquette, who makes the work of acting comedy and drama look effortless, gave it to me knowing it also crystalized the struggle of a writer. The real battle isn’t writing comedy or drama. It’s mixing the two. In crime and thriller novels, it’s murder. But not impossible. There’s simply a high degree of difficulty. Yet, when it works, it’s freaking magical. I’m talking about you, Mick Herron. Your Slow Horses series crackles with mystery and tension. But what elevates it is the humor. Reviewers call it dark comedy. I call it human comedy because it comes out of characters responding like real people to real situations. Sometimes with fright, horror, violence, or tears. Other times, with a wisecrack or an insult. Or, when one of them is Jackson Lamb, the world-weary den father of MI5’s dumpster, with a loud, prolonged, public passing of gas. Reading Herron, you let out shock laughter in the backwash of tragedy. His novels are a must-study for a tone balance that’s pitch perfect. Why? I worked on Nurse Jackie, a dark comedy TV series. That meant we wore the twin masks of drama and comedy. Like I said, a high degree of difficulty. So, beginning each year, I made a speech to the writers’ room that, to pull off this feat, comedy and drama need to be good roommates. It’s that simple and that complex. Let’s stick with books. Let’s celebrate the alchemists—authors who forged tense mysteries and thrillers where humor also thrives. Like Janet Evanovich, right from the gate, in 1 for the Money. Elmore Leonard, who mined humor with hapless strivers in Swag, Get Shorty, and more. Then there’s Carl Hiaasen and the recently departed Tim Dorsey, both making Florida seem like a fun place to take a beating. Rachel Howzell Hall brings the funny amid tragedy through her LA homicide detective, Elouise Norton. Can’t leave off Robert Crais, Joe R. Lansdale, or Gregory McDonald. And then there’s the master, Donald E. Westlake, who consistently staged a Cirque du Soleil balancing act in The Ax, The Hook, and his intimidatingly sublime Dortmunder series. These top-flight authors took me to school. I’ve not only studied how they crafted a story, I’ve marveled at the ways they threaded the needle between laughter and slaughter. They helped me find my hybrid voice in my first novel, The Trigger Episode, and all seven of my Nikki Heat series, writing as Richard Castle. I’m still learning from them. What have I learned? If you’re looking for rules, I’m not your guy. In his essay, “Ten Rules of Writing,” Elmore Leonard’s first rule was never open a book with weather. My first Nikki Heat novel was entitled Heat Wave, and guess what I opened with? Yup. Elmore Leonard, you were a god to me but, sorry, Dutch, that book went to number six on the New York Times list. Then there’s “Mario Puzo’s Godfatherly Rules for Writing a Bestselling Novel.” First rule: “Never write in the first person.” Huh. My latest spy thriller, The Accidental Joe, had difficulty getting traction at first, a euphemism for WTF?! At the risk of finding a horse’s head in my bed, I undertook a page-one rewrite, changing to…the first person. The process was scary, but the upshot was a fresher book with a singular voice, some healthy swagger, and a fat dollop of organic humor. It sold immediately. So, let’s not talk rules; let’s talk considerations. First off, why use humor? You may have your own reasons. One of mine is to use it with protagonists who are new to a world so I can have them draw on sarcasm, irony, and wisecracks to expose truth and react to norms without going all earnest. Not a fan of earnest. What about jokes? Consider that a no. It’s a mystery or thriller, not open-mic night at the Chuckle Hut. The minute you start writing in joke forms (A hitman walks into a bar…) do some hard thinking. The best comedy comes from character, attitude, and point of view, not one liners. Save the banana peels. As above, slapstick and pratfalls are red flags. Just like joke-jokes, extreme physical comedy smacks of contrivance and tone breakage. Be honest. Does your humor play real? Put yourself in the situation. Whatever action is going on around you, would you really say or do this? Really? Are you trying to wear two masks at once? Humor works if it’s well placed. Sometimes the perfect lighthearted dialogue collides with darker action or slows the pace. Remember that thing about comedy and drama being good roommates? Be careful not to shoehorn in humor where it becomes a distraction or an obstacle. A life-death chase or your climax is not the time to bring out the laugh track. I try to spot it where the readers can catch their breath after I’ve just taken it away. Character will make humor work for you. The key is to make it organic. If it’s something only this one person could say or do and only in this moment, your chances are good. Be consistent. Establish your tone and stick with it. The sudden appearance or disappearance of humor is as jarring as a POV swap. Finally, trust your gut. If the funny is funny but feels “off,” don’t force it. Basic as it sounds, humor works when it works. If it’s not right, don’t deny your feelings. Adjust or cut. If in doubt, walk away and grab one of those above books. You may come back inspired. Or at least have a good laugh. *** View the full article

Chicago has produced more than a few successful African-American writers, in both the literary and sales sense, including Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Willard Motley and Sam Greenlee. Inspired greatly by Richard Wright, whose classic texts Native Son and Black Boy helped create a literary path for many Black boys with a pen and a headful of ideas, novelist Ronald L. Fair isn’t as well known as his textual contemporaries, but he was another wonderful writer who emerged from that hard city. Fighting every step of the way as he embarked on the revolutionary road of creating literature on his own terms, he had a bigger mission in mind than just fame and fortune. “I doubted that I would ever make any money as a writer of this kind of fiction, but that didn’t matter because I would be telling it like it is,” Fair wrote in an essay published in the April, 1965 issue of Negro Digest. “No more polite lies. No more biting of the tongue or twisting of truths. Richard Wright’s death would mean something, because I would keep him in mind and swing away.” According to “Bearing Witness in Black Chicago” by Maryemma Graham (1990), “Fair began writing in high school in order to provide an outlet for his own developing and inquiring mind. Like Red Top, a character in the novella ‘World of Nothing,’ writing was a mental and spiritual exercise. But the path that led to a literary career was interrupted by three years in the Navy and two years at a Chicago business college. Then Fair spent ten years as a court reporter for the city of Chicago.” Fair’s 1963 debut was the slim Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable. A dark satire in more ways than one (it was reissued last year from the Library of America), the book depicts a fictional Mississippi town called Jacobs County that neglects to tell their local “colored folks” that slavery is over. After a few of the slaves, most notably Jacobs County elders Granny Jacobs and Preacher Harris (the only Black person in town who could read) discover that there exists a free world beyond their plantations, they became fixated on getting their families to the Negro Promised Land they believe Chicago to be. When a copy of the Black-owned/Chicago based Ebony magazine is mailed to the town, word gets out that there was a place where they could live as nicely as white people and keep a few dollars in their pockets. When Fair decided to satirize slavery it could have gone all wrong, but, as Negro World (owned by Ebony’s parent company Johnson Publications) observed in 1965: “It is a measure of Mr. Fair’s artistry that the pain and fury behind the laughter is always finely felt.” Yet, while the golden streets of Chicago and other northern wonderlands (Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York) served as the perfect strivers’ fantasy, the reality of those harsh, cold cities was quite different than expected: shabby tenements, and later housing projects, replaced the plantations and the laws of justice still weren’t balanced. Fair, whose own parents made the sojourn from Mississippi, was born and raised in Chicago and knew very well the levels of race inequality that were prevalent in housing, schooling, banking, salaries paid and the policing of Black communities. These heavy subjects are tackled in Fair’s powerful and naturalistic second novel Hog Butcher (1966). This told the story of a college-bound Chi-Town high school basketball champion headed for college named Nathaniel Hamilton, whom everyone calls Cornbread. A neighborhood hero, Cornbread is gunned down by a white policeman who mistook him for a thief as he ran home in the rain holding a bottle of orange soda. The policeman, half an interracial duo of blue boys, thought Cornbread was the burglar they had been pursuing minutes before, but his deadly mistake causes the community and “the system” to explode. A small riot breaks out minutes after Cornbread is slain and the mayor’s sends in a task force of, “twelve officers, all over six feet, cruising slowly down the block on motorcycles. They were so big the motorcycles looked like children’s toys under them,” to occupy the neighborhood like a military force.” With the only witness to their senseless crime being a ten-year old kid, Wilford Robinson, who along with his buddy Earl, idolized every cool Cornbread made on the battlegrounds of the basketball courts, the goal of everyone including civic leaders, the welfare agency and violent cops, one who beats-up Wilford’s mother, is to make the boy be quiet. As the state builds their web of lies, the truth becomes the scariest enemy. Negro Digest editor Hoyt W. Fuller wrote in the October, 1966 issue of that publication, “Hog Butcher is…a sharp portrayal of a diseased city. That the picture might fit any American city is merely coincidental.” Author Richard Guzman, editor of Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It?, wrote a 2015 essay on Fair and Hog Butcher, “Though some have commented on the novel’s humor and, in particular, on the energy and courage of the two adolescent protagonists through whom some of the action is seen, the novel is a sobering exploration of social class … and, of course, police violence.” In The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches (2005) author Bernard W. Bell wrote that Fair borrowed the term “hog butcher” from Carl Sandburg’s 1914 poem “Chicago” (‘Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders…’), but also believed that “the white Chicago system is the hog butcher that cuts out the souls of blacks.” Maryemma Graham notes, “Hog Butcher, considered by most critics to be (Fair’s) best, drew heavily upon his intimate knowledge of Chicago’s legal system. Fair sets up the oppositional forces in Hog Butcher on several levels… Fair is quite detailed in his descriptions about how the police department and the court systems work with regard to black people and the black community, obviously drawing upon his years of experience as a courtroom reporter. This necessarily leads to a focus on the social dynamics of the black urban experience, a fact which invited some very negative reviews from Fair’s critics.” “Hog Butcher was different from any novel I had ever read,” novelist Cecil Brown wrote in a 2020 essay. Brown, who considered Fair one of his literary heroes, met him in 1966. “His prose was exciting and infectious; you could not begin reading one sentence without reading the next sentence. But the most important thing was it was about police brutality. The story was set right in Chicago where we were having riots.” When Hog Butcher was reissued in 2014 from Northwestern University Press, Brown wrote the forward, In 1975, during the height of the Blaxploitation movement that was going down in American movies, Hog Butcher was adapted by screenwriter Leonard Lamensdorf and director Joe Mandrake. Released under the title Cornbread, Earl and Me, the picture was an American International Picture release that starred thirteen-year-old Laurence Fishburne in his film debut as Wilford. There was also NBA star Keith Wilkes as Cornbread, Rosalind Cash as Wilford’s mother and Bernie Casey playing the other policeman. Soul-jazz unit The Blackbyrds did the soundtrack. Though not as brilliant as the funky scores composed by Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield, leader Donald Byrd created a serviceable soundtrack. While filming the adaption, considered a classic in some quarters, told the story from Wilford’s point of view, Fair used the third-person omniscient that showed readers how Cornbread’s murder affected each side from the Black cop and the frightened grocery store owner to the uncaring Deputy Coroner and the knight in shining armor lawyer Benjamin Blackwell, who was working for Cornbread’s family. In Cecil Brown’s forward to the 2014 edition, he wrote, “Mr. Fair presented a new style of writing in Hog Butcher. The story is told not in a traditional narrative mode, but in an impressionistic style that relies heavily on interior monologue. The style enables Fair to move into and out of the minds of different characters and back and forth between past and present. Along with Richard Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today! (published posthumously in 1963), Hog Butcher can be seen as a milestone in the use of interior monologue to portray the consciousness of African American characters.” Although Fair never claimed that Hog Butcher was based on a specific case, almost sixty years after its initial publication the novel serves as a reminder that American police brutality in the Black community wasn’t something that began in the age of cell phone cameras, police dashcam footage and surveillance monitors. Four years before the film version was released, Fair was encouraged by writer Chester Himes to flee the racism of Chicago in 1971; he lived in various European countries before finally settling in Finland in 1972. Since Hog Butcher was reissued in 2014, more writers and critics have embraced the book, including a chapter I wrote for Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 and an essay by writer Kathleen Rooney, who stated in 2022, “I would like to nominate Fair’s novel to appear alongside To Kill a Mockingbird on syllabi everywhere because instead of exceptionalism and white saviors, Fair’s story depicts—with a cast of lovable, hateable, believable characters from the young man who gets murdered to the cops who murder him—how power’s highest aim is always to preserve itself and how collective action is the best hope anyone can have against systemic injustice.” Though his work is important, Fair didn’t think America appreciated Black writers. “Being a Black writer was a dead end,” Fair told Cecil Brown in 2010. Eight years later, in February, 2018, Fair died from a a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 86. According to his widow Hannele, though he stopped publishing, Ronald L. Fair never stopped writing. “I have many of his unpublished manuscripts with me that deserve to be published,” she wrote Cecil Brown in 2018. Hopefully one day those works will be shared with the world. View the full article

El Nino-induced flooding of biblical proportions has inundated my home this year, which can mean only one possible thing: TIME TO READ SOME GOTHIC FICTION! It’s giving damp. It’s giving mold. It’s giving drip-drip-drip on the window pane. And the weather event causing me personal misery is also a perfect in-road to highlighting one of the greatest years yet in the Great Gothic Fiction revival. It could have been a great moment for fungal fiction, but we already covered that trend in Lit Hub with this fantastic list for lovers (and haters) of The Last of Us. Carmella Lowkis, Spitting Gold (Atria) All is not what it seems in this lush and twist-filled tale. Two spiritualist sisters, famed in their teen years for their convincing seances, must come together for one last con. Spitting Gold is carefully plotted, fully characterized, and incredibly satisfying. Let the ectoplasm flow! L.S. Stratton, Do What Godmother Says (Union Square, June 11) L.S. Stratton’s new gothic thriller is divided between the Harlem Renaissance past and a writer in D.C.’s present. In the past, a young painter is taken under the wing of a mysterious socialite; her new hopes for the security to pursue artistic freedom are quickly dashed as she learns how controlling her new patron can be. In the present, a journalist comes into possession of a valuable painting, only to find herself beset by collectors who seem ready to engage in unscrupulous methods in order to get their hands on the piece of art. Do What Godmother Says is both a prescient critique of artistic appropriation and a darn good mystery—in short, an immensely satisfying read. Donyae Coles, Midnight Rooms (Amistad, July 2) Never. Eat. What. The. Fairies. Give. You. Especially if it’s as disgusting as what’s consumed at the wedding feast in this atmospheric gothic (complete with strong folk horror elements). Donyae Coles’ plucky heroine is surprised to receive a later-in-life proposal from a mysterious gentleman. Their connection is genuine, but his family is off-putting, his manor house is crumbling, and for some reason, he keeps getting her drunk on honey wine while feeding her bloody meat and little cakes. What does he want, and what will she have to sacrifice to give it to him? Clare Pollard, The Modern Fairies (Avid Reader Press, July 23) While debatably gothic, this novel set in 17th century ancien regime France is most certainly suited to the damp—after all, it was an era long before dehumidifiers (of which I now possess four). The Modern Fairies features the great historical salons of Paris, in which literary luminaries mingled with the demimonde and mixed witty repartee with inventive storytelling. Pollard’s characters are reinventing their nation’s traditional stories and creating the modern fairy tale, even as the details of their lives show the the rot of French society before the Revolution. John Fram, No Road Home (Atria, July 23) A wealthy preacher’s compound is the setting for this gothic parable from the author of The Bright Lands. The narrator of No Road Home, newly wedded to the beautiful scion of a megachurch pastor, is visiting his wife’s family for the first time when a storm closes them off from the rest of the world just as their patriarch is found dead. Even before the disturbing demise, Fram’s hero is already having second thoughts about the marriage: her relatives keep making snide remarks about his gender nonconforming son, it turns out his wife only married him to unlock her own inheritance, every family member appears to be keeping secrets, and someone’s been painting threatening messages warning of vengeance to come. Oh, and there’s also a ghost and some very disturbing paintings… Del Sandeen, This Cursed House (Berkley, October 8) Jemma Barker is broke and newly single when a strange offer comes in: a lucrative position has opened up with a wealthy family on their Louisiana plantation, and Jemma needs to get out of Chicago, fast. It’s 1962 and the world is changing, but for the family on the plantation, things appear to be frozen in time, as the family is still stuck in the colorism that allows them to feel superior to the darker-skinned Jemma. Sandeen’s heroine soon learns that the family has summoned her for a very particular purpose: they are cursed, and they believe her to be the only one who can save them from future calamity. View the full article

I was never a fan of science fiction. I have a vivid imagination but with the exception of the original Star Trek, there’s something about stories set on different planets, or filled with aliens or with robot point-of-views that disconnects me from the story in a way in which I can’t recover. But I’ve discovered in the past few years that much like my coffee, I do enjoy science fiction in very specific ways. My latest novel An Intrigue Of Witches is a treasure hunt founded in a historical mystery with coded messages and puzzles to be solved. It combines my favorite genres: mystery, adventure, fantasy and science fiction. My favorite time travel tropes are ones grounded in reality, set in the near future and fueled by hard science – meaning the scifi elements have to be scientifically accurate and logical. I enjoy reading science fiction that is believable and almost doable with our contemporary understanding of science and level of technical advancement. But I also need my scifi to have a lot of heart. Poignancy. Be character-driven and based in family connections and interpersonal relationships. I suppose I need some sort of anchoring, if I’m to explore science fiction in a way that makes sense to me. I have probably watched more scifi TV and film than I have read books in the genre, but the few I have read share the same four elements: a government or military context—because let’s face it, if time travel is a thing, it’s highly probable that the military and or government will seek to control the technology. Secondly, based on the frequency in which we are advancing in technology, it will happen sooner than later. Thirdly, the scifi elements are based on technology that is already existing in the real world. And lastly, include a well-developed main character, who themselves are navigating significant relationships with their family and friends throughout the story. To that end, here are my three recommendations for time travel books suited to readers who don’t usually read science fiction. Version Control by Dexter Palmer This novel almost appears to not to be about time travel. Like it’s not a dark, looming shadow over the characters in the story. The main character, Rebecca is living her life, dealing with the minutiae of being an adult, while her husband, a scientist is hard at work on a device that is like a time machine but definitely not a mechanism for travel through time. The most important events are happening off the page, but they are impacting the lives of the characters in the most incalculable of ways. It’s a very nuanced, indirect look at time travel, and how it could impact lives. Here and Now and Then, by Michael Chen This story is about a regular Joe that readers can relate to. The main character, Kin Stewart lives in our world. He is a husband and father, works in IT and struggles to maintain a positive relationship with his daughter. The twist? Kin is a government time traveler from the future who was stranded in the past when one of his devices malfunctioned. With no way to return to 2142, he creates a life for himself in his past and our today. What could go wrong? A lot. Especially when a team member finally returns to bring him back to his world and a family he doesn’t remember. At its heart, this is a family drama, a story about hard choices and the impact time travel can have on every day people. The Rise And Fall Of Dodo by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland The main character in this book, Melisande Stokes, is an expert in linguistics and languages at Harvard. Her life is irretrievably changed when she randomly bumps into a military intelligence operator who asks her to translate some very old documents that may prove a long history of magic in the world, abruptly cut off in the mid-1800s. This mishmash of history, fantasy, science fiction, time travel and witches provides an intriguing look at how the government might try to fix history if they had access to both magic and time travel. *** View the full article

For some reason the forum will only let me change a few words here and there. So I've written a revised answer to the 4th Assignment - Comps. COMPARABLES Revised Version. Recent Titles: It’s been difficult to find newer fantasy epics with middle-aged protagonists. I’ve listed the three below based on reading the samples and plot descriptions. Each has a protagonist with strong skills or gifts, living quiet lives until they’re unexpectedly thrust into a quest to save the world/their families. The Shadow of What Was Lost, James Islington The Last Ranger, J.D.L. Rosell The Song of All, Bk 1, Tina LeCount Myers Older Titles: Eye of the World, series, Robert Jordan: While I'm not at the level of Robert Jordan, his "magic" system is similar in that it uses inborn gifts that need mental focus to use, and they can be difficult or impossible to use if the practitioner has an emotional difficulty. I see the two series below as “aspirational” in their prose style and characterizations. I like the authors’ writing, the action moves at a good pace, and the characters are relatable (and past their 20's, with life experience to show for it). The world-building is detailed and feels “lived in”. Legend of Paksennarion series, Elizabeth Moon: A protagonist unaware of the magic he’s inherited, until he finds his unknown family background. Protag and allies must protect their kingdoms from dark magic. World of Five Gods series, Lois McMaster Bujold: Two of the three books in this trilogy have middle-aged protagonists who must use their wits and life experience to defeat dark-magic antagonists. Meanwhile, the search for more recent comp titles goes on…

FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement. A young woman sets out to find a missing girl to try to forgive herself for the cousin she couldn’t save a decade ago. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: sketch the antagonist. The antagonist of my story is a drug dealer named Lucifer. He is the one that Fiona witnesses kidnap the missing girl, but a twist comes in the final battle scene revealing who he is conspiring with. Lucifer is an antagonist to two different women that Fiona becomes, giving her two perspectives of him and his capabilities. He’s a tattoo-covered skinhead, small and scrappy, seeking power and control wherever he can get it. The reader also learns about Lucifer’s back story through third-person POV threaded throughout the novel, which gives insight into who he was before he went “bad” ahead of when the protagonist figures it out. The third person POV gives more information about Kevin, the supporting character/love interest/missing girl’s brother, and informs the reader that Lucifer was Kevin’s best friend turned nemesis. Lucifer kidnaps Kevin’s sister (the missing girl, Hannah) in retaliation. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: BREAKOUT TITLE The Vicarious Life of Fiona Ferguson The Lonely Life of Fiona Ferguson The Mystical Mind of Fiona Ferguson FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: - Two smart comparables for your novel. Genre: Magical Realism (could be marketed as Mystery or Book Club fiction) Comps: The Midnight Library by Matt Hair meets All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound. When a young woman gets the power to immerse herself in the past life of secondhand merchandise the last time it was worn, she witnesses a missing girl’s kidnapping and embarks on a journey to face her inner demons and uncover the secrets being covered up in a small New Jersey town. SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. The primary conflict is to find Hannah, the missing girl, whom Fiona witnessed being kidnapped. Fiona feels more like an underdog than a heroine, but her cousin’s unsolved case drives her forward despite her inferiority complex. Inner conflict: After being depressed for a decade, Fiona struggles with self-doubt and insecurity. She feels like an outcast. She’s struggling to find purpose and claim her place in the world. When Fiona runs into an old friend and hears about the girl’s family and career, Fiona feels small, unaccomplished, and insecure. While others were building their lives, she was secluded from the world and missing out on new experiences. She must grow beyond her victim mentality to become a victor, move forward, and get what she wants out of life. Secondary Conflict: Fiona’s new boyfriend turns out to be the son of her parent’s old friend, a pervert she secretly saw sexually molest her teenage cousin before she went missing. Fiona must decide if she can escape her negative association with her boyfriend’s father and be with the first young man she’s ever wanted to love. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail. The setting of my novel takes place in a small town in New Jersey. Freeman is a made-up place modeled after a little town along the Delaware River just over the border from Pennsylvania. Built upon Native American soil, the town is filled with ancient stories about early settlers who built their fortunes by establishing the area’s first railroad system, their ancestors continuing their legacy of wealth and power, generation after generation. The town is similar to many small American towns where everyone is connected somehow—through work, school, church, etc. My story is set in the present day, but in an effort to make it timeless, I did not incorporate the use of too much modern technology. Much of the story occurs at Second Chances, a thrift shop where Fiona works. Here, she finds the enchanted sculpture that turns her life upside down. Fiona’s apartment is also part of the plot. It is a little garage that she moves into early in the story as her parents urge her to be independent. Many other settings in my story are briefly visited as Fiona travels into the lives of others—an alleyway, a burger joint, Princeton, a lavish estate, a nightclub, and a gym, to name a few. The settings change to different places, periods, and seasons in New Jersey, with one exception briefly taking Fiona to the West Coast. When Fiona travels into the former life of donated merchandise, each new setting is vividly described as she experiences the moments she’s vicariously living, embracing them with all of her senses.

The Lavender Hill Mob, which was made in 1951, is a film of endless charm and joy. It is a caper, which is (in my opinion) the best genre. And it was made by Ealing Studios, an English production company that was formally established in 1929, though on a site that had been home to different filmmaking companies since 1902. From 1929 through the end of World War II, the studio was known for making both comedy films and war documentaries, but in 1947, it discovered a kind of narrative and stylistic niche, really sensibility, that would lead to the creation of its masterpieces and cemented it as a cornerstone of British cinema. The film that was made in 1947 was a comic, vaguely crimey adventure called Hue and Cry, a story about kids who find themselves on a great adventure in bombed-out postwar London. But the films that followed, especially three that came out in 1949—Alexander Mackendrick’s Whiskey Galore!, Henry Cornelius’s Passage to Pimlico, and Robert Hamer’s Kind Hears and Coronets—helped shape the tone of this niche, even further. Ealing Studios chiefly produced films that were invested in exploring Britishness; rather, exploring facets of British identity through exaggerations of associated themes, such as class, war trauma, and emotional repression. The Lavender Hill Mob is about that last thing. Directed by Charles Crichton, written by T.E.B. “Tibby” Clarke, one of Ealing’s best and most prolific writers (who won the Academy Award for his screenplay), it is the story of, in the words of scholar Terry Williams, “the repressed fantastic.” It is about two men, neighbors in the small Battersea London neighborhood of Lavender Hill, who become unlikely collaborators, compatriots, and friends by giving into their desires and pursuing a life of crime. Our hero is a mild-mannered bank transfer agent played by Alec Guinness (known best by younger generations for playing Obi Wan in the original Star Wars), and a frustrated artist played by Stanley Holloway (best known as playing Alfred Dolittle in My Fair Lady), who team up to commit an extraordinary heist. The Lavender Hill Mob is about finding an alternative to one’s own life and living that instead. Guinness (who would star in several Ealing films—the aforementioned Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit, from 1952, and The Ladykillers from 1955) is our antihero Henry Holland. He has dutifully worked for the bank for two decades, facilitating the transfer of gold bullion from foundry to bank, every week. Holloway is Alfred Pendlebury, who dreams of being a sculptor but has to settle for carving stone in his off-hours; his day job is making lead souvenir statues. But it’s not long before Holland realizes that, if one wanted to smuggle stolen gold out of the country, all they’d have to do is melt and smelt it into figurines and ship them abroad. Holland knows that, even if he gets promoted, he’ll never ever make enough money to live a good life. Pendlebury knows he’ll never make it as an artist. So, the realization of an easy smuggling opportunity gives them both a new raison d’être. But they’re going to need help, so they pretend to be tough-guys and enlist the help of two criminals (Alfie Bass and Sidney James), forming a bank robbing gang for the ages. Both men are seeking, in different degrees of awareness, a reprieve from the repressive grind of their lives, of their world. Williams calls their desire “freedom from British stagnation and creative frustration.” He cites an example, a scene in which Holloway’s character does a mock interpretation of Richard the Third while making a bust, quoting , “Of all words of tongue and pen… The saddest are these… It might have been me… “Slave. I have set up my life as a cast.” This exemplifies how his anxieties about a lost and ignominious future are tired up in a visage of Britishness. It makes sense then, that a symbol of their long-elusive freedom winds up manifesting as the opposite of being British, which is to say, as looking quite French. This is to say, they plan that, after they manage to rob the gold from the bank (which is no simple feat, on its own), they’ll melt it into miniature Eiffel Tower figurines and load them on a boat to France. In doing so, they give themselves their first vacation, a rip-roaring sightseeing opportunity up and down France (horizontally as well as vertically… you’ll see what I mean). Holland and Pendlebury quickly become dear friends—thick as, shall we say, thieves. They embrace passionately several times. They laugh hysterically as they chase a mark down the Eiffel Tower staircase. They even rename themselves, with Pendlebury choosing the nickname “Al” and Holland choosing, of all things, “Dutch.” The surprise of this moniker suggests that perhaps Holland has had more dreams, fantasies, alter-egos inside him than his staid career path might suggest. Indeed, The Lavender Hill Mob is about finding an alternative to one’s own life and living that instead. It is also a love story; of loving oneself, one’s friends, and also one’s own life. There are many magical tidbits sprinkled through, including a tiny appearances of a young, pre-fame Audrey Hepburn, and a young, pre-fame Robert Shaw. And, doubly exciting for you Lucasfilm fans, the cinematography was done by Douglas Slocumbe, who was the director of photography on all three original Indiana Jones films. But there is great magic not just in these little funny details. The Lavender Hill Mob is in a way about finding the underside of magic in everything—work, friendship, even, of all things, crime. View the full article

Film and television have given us a number of unforgettable serial killers to haunt our nightmares. Sometimes, their origins and crimes are inspired by the stories of real criminals in our world. Other times, offenses and offenders are conjured up entirely from nightmare ether, tales of bogeymen creeping in the shadows. Often, these fictional murderers start out as human and became monsters. In other cases, they were never human to begin with. They were created in darkness and remain within it, horrifying us with their dark imaginations and shocking deeds. Here are some of my favorite serial killers from the big and little screens, with their complicated histories and compelling characters. Norman Bates – Psycho (1960) Based in large part on serial killer Ed Gein, Norman Bates haunts the hidden Bates Motel. In this trap of a place, he murders a young embezzler on the run. The disappearance of a private eye investigating the embezzlement leads to Bates being captured, where it’s revealed that Bates has been living too far in his dead mother’s shadow…and in her head. Aside from killing his mother and stepfather, he kills women who he finds attractive. In the case of the PI, Bates murdered him to cover up his previous grisly crimes. Bates is a deeply disturbed man who visits his dysfunction on hapless people who fall into his trap. Hannibal Lecter – The Silence of the Lambs (1991) We meet Hannibal Lecter behind bars in his most famous film depiction, learning that the elegant serial killer developed a taste for having his victims over for dinner and turning them into leftovers. His series of horrific crimes is probed by fledgling FBI agent Clarice Starling as she chases another killer. Lecter’s escape into the world leaves the audience cold with fear, wondering who will be on his menu next. Lecter’s victims are people who have committed the cardinal sin of being rude, with a smattering of instrumental killings to aid his escape. Dracula – Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Perhaps the greatest serial killer of all time, Dracula sets sail to England. He kills as a means to survive, yes, but we have to think that he also enjoys it. This version of Dracula is partially a seductive gentleman who hides the ancient monster that lies beneath his genteel smile. Once can’t help how many hundreds of people he’s drained over the centuries. Maybe thousands? He’s a supernatural monster, and has been for centuries. Like the human killers on this list, he started out as human, though, twisted by the loss of love. Victor Tooms – The X-Files (1993, 1994) Appearing in two episodes of the X-Files, Victor Tooms is a mutant who has the creepy ability to squeeze into small spaces. He’s been around since the late nineteenth century, having ducked out of society occasionally to hibernate. He particularly enjoys liver, and often goes to great lengths to hide bodies. He seems to be an opportunistic killer, squishing himself into air ducts and pipes like a snake. When Mulder and Scully confront him, he’s potentially got dozens of kills under his belt and looking forward to more. The Joker – The Dark Knight (2008) Batman’s classic foe is imagined as a criminal mastermind, creating plots within plots to try and antagonize his nemesis. The Joker seems to kill for the thrills, yes, but many deaths are collateral damage to draw out Batman. His fascination for Batman is largely unexplained. But as Batman’s loyal butler observes: “Some people just want to watch the world burn.” In that sense, he is primarily an agent of pure chaos with no efforts made to conceal his murders. Rose the Hat – Dr. Sleep (2019) Always wearing her magic black hat, Rose leads a coven of psychic vampires who devour the “steam,” or life force, from magically-gifted children. In this sequel to The Shining, we learn that Rose’s people have lived a long, long time, devouring the innocent. Victims are carefully chosen, those who “shine.” But Rose may have met her match in the now-adult Danny Torrance and his young friend, Abra. One can’t hazard a guess about how many kills these ancient foes have amassed over the centuries, but the total might exceed Dracula’s. Patrick Bateman – American Psycho (2000) Bateman is a true psychopath, and one that the viewer loves to hate. He’s a Wall Street businessman who delights in killing as a power trip, choosing victims that he has social, financial, and physical power over. His grip on reality is tenuous, and we’re never certain which crimes he’s actually committed and which are all in his head. One thing’s certain, though…he blends in perfectly with his monstrous contemporaries by the end of the film. Dexter Morgan – Dexter (2006-2013) In contrast to Bateman, Dexter is the sort of serial killer one can sometimes root for. He starts off as a controlled killer, killing only people who have committed terrible wrongs—people like other serial killers who have evaded law enforcement. In his day job as a blood spatter analyst, he’s got a unique forensic viewpoint on how to get away with murder. And his father, a cop, taught him well. But Dexter’s moral code flags, and his personal life makes him vulnerable. By the end of the show, we’re left wondering what kind of monster he truly is. The Corinthian – Sandman (2022) The Corinthian is a rogue nightmare who doesn’t follow the rules. First created by Dream, he slipped into the waking world as an unauthorized entity, murdering young men and inspiring the murder of many others by humans who called themselves the Collectors. The Corinthian became a cult figure, an underground celebrity, until he’s ultimately confronted by Dream. The Corinthian was never human to begin with. Lacking eyes himself, he’s particularly fond of plucking out the eyes of his victims. He sees in the dark, and sees the awful impulses humanity has toward one another. These serial killers run the gamut from human to supernatural and everything in between. Each has a different take on the story of a monster, from ancient entities to ordinary people with axes to grind. In the world of fiction, a monster can be anyone. And that’s the scariest thing to contemplate in the real world. *** View the full article

There’s nothing I love more than sitting down with a queer mystery or thriller—obviously, as a writer of the genres myself! The twists, the turns, the “oh my god!” moments, there’s nothing like it. Add the riches of queer history, the complexity of queer identity, and the double-lives queer people often have to live and you’ve got a recipe for a killer thriller. Across YA and Adult, queer mystery and thriller are catching steam, throwing out convention and leaving us gasping at that final twist. Below are some of my favorites in both age categories, from the Dorian Gray inspired to the wilds of 1800’s smuggling rings. I hope you’ll pick up a few if you haven’t read them yet! SHE’S TOO PRETTY TO BURN by Wendy Heard: queer thriller inspired by Dorian Gray, has everything a Dorian Gray fan-girl like me could ask for. Entrenched in the rebel art scene, Heard’s morally gray and complex characters are as twisty as the plot itself. Arson, murder, and stalking abound in this rollercoaster of a book as Mick finds herself drawn into Veronica and Nico’s world. LAVENDER HOUSE by Lev C. Rosen: I’m a long-time fan of Rosen’s work in YA, but the Evander Mills series—of which LAVENDER HOUSE is the first—hooked me even deeper. Set in the 1950’s with a bit of a Knives Out-esque flavor, we explore the lives—and deaths—of the Lamontaine Estate, family and staff and the secrets that are keeping them safe—but also letting a killer get away with murder. AND DON’T LOOK BACK by Rebecca Barrow: Barrow is a must-buy for me. AND DON’T LOOK BACK dives into the life of Harlow and her complicated relationship with her mother. They’ve spent their entire life running—and when Harlow is forced to confront the past when an accident kills her mother, leaving behind a mysterious safety deposit box with clues to a life Harlow’s mother never told her about. This is what I would call a gut punch of a book. A thrill-ride that leaves you emotional, unsettled and hungry for more. A LINE IN THE DARK by Malinda Lo: While Lo is better known for her brilliant queer historicals, her earlier sci-fi and thrillers are a must for queer genre fans. A LINE IN THE DARK explores the complexity and intensity of female friendship and the lines between friend and crush. COME OUT COME OUT by Natalie C. Parker: I admit to being a bit of a tease for putting a book not out until August on this list, but I would be remiss to not include it. Mixing queer horror and mystery, Parker delves into heartbreak, family complexities, romance and a presence in the woods that does not intend to let our main characters go—or remember the truth. Parker is Queen of atmosphere and spookiness—she had me screaming by the end of chapter one! THE BEST BAD THINGS by Katrina Carrasco: Set in the 1800’s, this tale of a former Pinkerton detective Alma who is tasked with hunting down stolen opium by the mysterious Delphine, head of a smuggling ring and her new boss. Disguised as a man, Alma infiltrates a crime organization and wins their trust…but if they find out she’s a double-agent, all will be lost and she’ll be six feet in the ground. An evocative, atmospheric and propulsive read! *** View the full article

Jack Sterry sat astride the crossroads of history; at the right time and right place, he tried to shape the course of events by his actions. Sterry was part of an extraordinary group of men. Often referred to as Jessie Scouts, they were named after the wife of Major General John Charles Frémont, an explorer and a politician who was a US Senator from California and the first presidential candidate for the Republican Party in 1856. At the start of the Civil War, Frémont was a general officer in command of the Department of the West. Known as “the Pathfinder” for his pioneering missions that explored and mapped the West while fending off hostile Native Americans, Frémont organized the specialized group of operators at the beginning of the war in St. Louis and employed them in Missouri, which was embroiled in guerrilla fighting. His wife, Jessie Ann Benton Frémont, was the daughter of a US senator. The flaxen-haired beauty grew up at her father’s side, rubbing elbows with politicians and sharing his political views, including becoming an outspoken advocate against slavery. Brilliant, powerful, charismatic, and a tremendous advocate for her husband, one admiring journalist of the time dubbed Jessie not only a “historic woman but the greatest woman in America.” In many circles, it was known Jessie “was the better man of the two.” Reportedly, she first advised her husband’s Scouts to wear their enemies’ uniforms. “Jessie, who had been with her husband until lately, frequently saw these men and became very popular with them. Hence their present attachment to her. They swear by her and wear her initials on their coats, inserted in a very modest but coarse style.” In addition to embroidering her initials, they also adopted Jessie as their namesake. When John Charles Frémont moved east in the spring of 1862 to take command of the Mountain Department, located in southwest Virginia and what would become West Virginia, he brought men who understood rugged terrain and an enemy skilled in guerrilla fighting. The taming of the American West and conflict with Native Americans, including the adaptation of some of their fighting tactics, would have a profound impact on the foundations of American special operations and unconventional warfare. One contemporary stated that the Pathfinder “proceeded to follow his notion derived from experience in the Western frontier. He knew that the safety and efficiency of his army in a wild, wooded, and rugged region depended on the accuracy with which he received information of the plans and movements of the enemy. He at once called around him a set of Western frontiersmen, who had served all through the campaign in Missouri. Some had been in the border wars of Kansas; some served long years on the Plains, hunting the buffalo and the Indian; men accustomed to every form of hardship, thoroughly skilled, not only in the use of the rifle, but drilled in all cunning ways and devices to discover the intentions, position, and strength of a foe. The best of these men were selected and placed in a small organization called the Jessie Scouts.” One of the Jessie Scouts’ mentors, and an original member, was “Old Clayton, who had come with General Frémont from the West.” Old Clayton developed his survival skills while exploring the American West with Frémont and contending with hostile Native Americans. As chief scout and trainer of raw recruits, “he conceived a great fancy for ‘the boys’ and gave them a deal of advice and instruction.” Commonly known in camp as Clarence Clayton, but also Chatfield Hardaway, Old Clayton could not only give advice to colleagues but also serve up tactical acumen to their opponents. One such incident occurred in the fall of 1862. When scouting in a Confederate uniform in advance of a large Union cavalry force, he saw a lighted house on the side of the road. When he approached the dwelling, a Confederate picket challenged him. Clayton coolly responded that he was a friend. When Clayton bantered with the picket, the soldier revealed he was with a Confederate cavalry unit. Suddenly, nine men, including a Rebel officer, darted out of the house onto their saddles and confronted Clayton with their cocked revolvers. The Confederate officer demanded to know his identity. The wily scout informed the Confederate officer that he was a scout of Captain Duval’s Confederate Cavalry, and they were riding to reinforce a certain Confederate cavalry colonel. The Jessie Scout was told that the very officer he was going to reinforce was standing before him. “Captain Duval will be overjoyed to meet [you],” Clayton convincingly responded. According to a contemporary account, “At that moment the cavalry came down the road, and while the Colonel and his men were covering the scout,” Clayton called for the captain to come over and calmly introduced him to the Confederate colonel. The Union captain and his men surrounded the Southerners and “very coolly asked them for their arms.” Old Clayton then “apologized for practicing the ruse to save his life.” The Rebel colonel reportedly then “asked for a knothole to crawl into, remarking that he had been sold too cheap.” Members of the US Army, civilians, and later even a turncoat former Confederate cavalry trooper, the Scouts morphed into the enemy, taking on their uniforms, accents, and mannerisms: “He seems a Tennessean, a Georgian, an Irishman, a German—anything indeed but what he really is,” recalled one contemporary. To pass off as Confederates, the Jessie Scouts developed false backgrounds for men they impersonated and learned convincing cover stories to pass themselves off as the enemy. They began wearing white scarves knotted around their necks in a particular way in order to identify each other behind the lines. Jessie Scouts also developed a stilted coded conversation to identify friend from foe. Scout One: “Good morning.” Scout Two: “These are perilous times.” Scout One: “Yes, but we are looking for better.” Scout Two: “To what shall we look?” Scout One: “To the red and white cord.” They developed the exchange deliberately so that it could not be guessed. By the summer of 1862, the group numbered roughly two dozen men, including three Scouts recently captured and executed by Confederate troops. Considered spies for wearing the enemy’s uniform, they faced death if they fell into enemy hands. Their first commander, Captain Charles Carpenter, was initially a fitting leader for this handpicked group: “He was by no means a figure to be passed by. Fancy a poacher who is half brigand and wholly daredevil, and you catch a glimpse of his air. His high-topped velvet boots are drawn up over his wide velvet trousers. No vest is worn, and the expanse of a broad chest affords a fine field for the once snowy shirt-bosom of Parisian pretensions and fine material.” Dark haired, blue eyed, five feet six, and “sinewy and ready for a fight, fun, or frolic, [Carpenter] mingled his dash and boldness with remarkable prudence and caution.” Armed with a Colt and a breechloading rifle for distance shooting, Carpenter bragged he was a crack shot at more than a quarter of a mile. Trappings and appearance aside, at his core, Carpenter ardently hated slavery and told one reporter a tall tale that he was a member of John Brown’s party that attacked the Harpers Ferry arsenal in 1859 “by crawling through a long culvert, or covered drain, which led from the famous engine-house to the river. The Captain does not love the slave lords,” the journalist wrote after interviewing Carpenter. When not adorned in velvet and gold chains, daredevil and gloryhound Carpenter had sneaked into Confederate Fort Donelson in Tennessee in early February 1862 wearing a Confederate uniform, masquerading as an enemy officer: “I went into Fort Henry two days before the attack on it and brought General Grant an accurate account of the position and number of the Rebel forces and defenses,” he later recalled to a journalist. “I have General Grant’s letter certifying to that. Also, I went into Fort Donelson, while our troops lay at Fort Henry. I went in there in Confederate uniform; and I have General McClernand’s letter to show that I brought him information that proved to be accurate. On my way out a cavalry force passed me, while I lay by the roadside; and its commander told one of his men to leave a fine flag, which he feared would be torn on the way. The flag was stuck into the road, that a returning rebel picket might carry it in. But I got it, wrapped it around my body, and rode into Fort Henry with it.” Carpenter’s information gleaned while posing as a Confederate no doubt had a role in the battle for Fort Donelson waged between February 11 and 16, 1862. The capture of the fort opened the Cumberland River as a route of invasion into the South. Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant forced General Simon Bolivar Buckner to accept terms of unconditional surrender, earning Grant the immortal nickname “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. A master of disguise, Carpenter once wore a woman’s dress to execute a clandestine mission: “Once [I] Rode down to the Rebel pickets at Wilson Creek, dressed as a woman to deliver a letter . . . and this trip was made because ‘the General’ wanted to know precisely the position of part of the Rebel lines.” Not so lucky, other members of Carpenter’s command were sometimes captured by Union forces. One Jessie Scout was initially arrested for being an enemy spy, “James Alexander, who was arrested in the uniform of a [Confederate] Captain of Cavalry, was released yesterday. Finding him to be one of the Jessie Scouts, as he reported.” Ingenuity was a hallmark of the Scouts, who often had to perilously improvise on the job. They were selected for their aplomb, audacity, valor, and intelligence, “special faculties born in some few men,” wrote one contemporary author. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Unvanquished © 2024 by Patrick K. O’Donnell. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved. Featured image: Captain William J. Lawton, one of the Jessie Scouts View the full article

If the world is flat like the Internet says, then this is the edge. The mountains on either side of the Cajon Pass are crumbled and cracked ruins slumping under a starless sky. It looks like where the earth runs out, the place before no place. Not that Luke really believes the earth is flat. But just now it seems like one of those online ideas – like the one about how the government and corporations are run by lizards only playing at being people – that’s true enough to make a point. Luke is nineteen, tall in a way nobody ever seems to notice, everything about him drawn thin like he’s been stretched on a rack. His hair is getting long, odd bits sticking out all over. He’s got the eyes of someone outnumbered, even when he is alone – maybe then most of all. He’s driven for sixteen hours now, that long slow fall from Colorado to California, stopping only to piss or buy food. He drives slumped forward so that he steers with his forearms resting on the wheel, so tired that ghost rabbits dance at the corners of his eyes. His stomach burns, his gut flora roiling in open rebellion. He figures they’ve earned the right. He’s been firebombing them all day with energy drinks and bags of flamin’ hot extruded whatever. Or maybe it’s something else that’s riled them. Something that’s been bubbling in him since he passed into California for the first time in twelve years. Something thick and black that tastes like root beer. He is coming home. His head snaps up, a trance breaking. How long had it been since he’d thought about the road? Weird how the body can drive without you, how there is a stranger in your brain that keeps you from drifting across the center line while you are somewhere else. He cracks the window to let the cold air slap him awake. In his memories of this place – the ones he lets himself have – the Inland Empire is a place of unending heat. He forgot how cold the nights can be, how sometimes the desert holds no ghost of the heat that rules it during the day. The music he’s streaming feels wrong now. Skittering mumble rap he got into at school, echoing weirdness that sounded right in his cave of an apartment in Colorado Springs. Here on the edge of the world it sounds tinny and bad. He pokes at his phone to shut it off. He drives in silence. His teeth harvest the skin off his lips in thin strands. His hands drum against the wheel. He jabs the radio button. A blast of static. He jabs again, his radio scanning to find a station. A man bellows – Low cost insurance even if you have a DUI – an air-horn choir behind him. It is demonic as fuck. But better than the silence. Luke’s phone tells him the turn-off is coming. He checks behind him to switch lanes, catches a rear-view glimpse of the back seat crammed with everything he owns. His clothes piled in a hamper, his skateboard. The box with his single pot and his single pan, the plastic spoon and spatula. His box of books, his Algebra 101 textbook poking out of the top. Looking at the math book fills him with hot shame. Maybe that’s why he brought it, gave it this place of honor in the rear-view mirror. To remind him how he wound up here, the only place he has left to run to, the last place in the world he belongs. The exit to Devore looms ahead. The pulse in his neck thumps turn-back turn-back turn-back. Turn back where? To his apartment in Colorado Springs that he fled owing two months’ rent? To his mother’s people who had passed him around like a serving dish from the time he was seven until exactly the day of his eighteenth birthday? Again he has that feeling like he’s standing with his toes poking over the edge of this flat earth. He thinks on something he read in a novel in Intro to World Lit, before he quit going to class altogether. About how when you peek over the side of a cliff and get that swooshing feeling in your belly, that it isn’t a fear of falling. In fact, the book said, it is the opposite. Vertigo is the fight in your mind between the part that wants to save you and the part that wants to fall. The exit lanes slopes down from the highway. He takes it down into the dark. __________________________________ Excerpt continues after cover reveal. The Last King of California (Mulholland Books, November 2024) __________________________________ His only memories of this place are a child’s, so that it feels both familiar and strange at the same time. Like the rooms in a dream. Luke’s wheels spit gravel as he leaves the paved road and heads up into the hills. Rock walls dotted with grease-wood and mummified monkeyflowers rise up on either side. He looks down at his phone. Here in the crevices there is no signal. Something inside tells him when to turn. He drives in submarine dark for three football fields before he sees the lights. Home. At least it was once. The sheet-metal gate that dead-ends the gravel road is pulled shut. Past the gate, up the hill, Luke can see the house with its broad front porch. He remembers a swinging loveseat. Now there’s only a row of fold-out camping chairs, the kind that look woven out of seat belts. A couple of big trucks sit in the gravel in front of the house. Lights burn behind the curtains of the front windows. Behind the house the box canyon stretches, and in the half-moon light he can see shadows of junkers and brush piles, and something new, something like a second house against the far back wall of the canyon. Luke knows there’s no nerves in the meat of the brain, so this feeling of a thumb pressed deep into the center of his head is just bullshit. But he feels it anyway – the pressure that is almost always there, juicing his adrenal gland. You cannot smell adrenaline, but Luke’s sure it smells like root beer. Luke stops his car and climbs out to lift the hitch and open the gate. He’s too tired to lift his feet clear. They shush through the gravel as he walks to the latch. ‘Hey now,’ a voice says in the dark. Luke freezes, his hand inches from the latch. He has this feeling like being dunked in cold water. This scuzzy kid comes out of the dark. The kid, old enough to drive but not much more, is a head-and-a-half shorter than Luke, but stocky. His dark hair hangs greasy down to his shoulders; he has a sad teenage mustache. He wears a heavy metal T-shirt under a jean jacket with the sleeves hacked off. He carries something long in his hands. The pit bull that runs ahead of him is the color of a bad day. Her ears are combat-clipped into tiny triangles and her muzzle carries old scars, but when she pokes her head between the wide slats of the gate her tongue lolls out of a friendly idiot grin. The kid follows behind. When he steps into the slashes of headlight Luke sees the thing in his hands is a rifle. ‘You’re in the wrong place.’ No shit, Luke almost says. ‘I’m Luke.’ He tries to say it strong and clear, but it gets caught up in his throat and comes out a rasp. ‘You’re what now?’ The kid is not pointing the rifle at Luke, but he holds it at the ready. Luke can’t meet the kid’s eyes so he studies his shirt, the words ‘POWER TRIP’ written in electric letters, a skeleton king underneath the logo. ‘I’m Luke,’ he says again, better this time. ‘They know I’m coming. Del’s my uncle.’ The kid spits into the dark. ‘You’re Luke Crosswhite?’ Luke almost reaches for his wallet, like he’s going to show this kid ID to prove it. He catches himself, thinks about how lame that would be. He nods instead and mumbles some sort of yes. The kid works his jaw like he’s thinking of spitting again but can’t wrangle the sputum to pull it off. ‘Kathy said you was en route. I thought it was like next week is all. You’re a college kid, right?’ ‘I was.’ He doesn’t say, Before I blew it all up. The kid scratches himself under the chin with the barrel of the rifle, as if thinking on casual suicide. He looks Luke over, like he’s trying to make sense of how this skinny kid with scared eyes could be the seed of Big Bobby Crosswhite. ‘You even know what goes on down here?’ he asks. ‘Yeah.’ The kid laughs like the hell you do. ‘So you’re coming to join the Combine then?’ the kid asks, but Luke’s pretty sure he’s fucking with him, that even in the dark this kid must be able to see from the sweat on Luke’s forehead and the pulse of his neck that Luke has no place in his family’s business, no matter who his dad is. ‘I just need a place to crash, get my head above water, you know?’ The kid blows across the rifle’s muzzle, drawing out a low sad tone. ‘Well, they got a place laid out for you. Hell, it’s your dad’s land anyway, right?’ Luke can almost see the thoughts splash across the kid’s face next as he has them one by one: But your dad’s not here – ten years left on his sentence at least – oh shit oh shit— ‘Oh shit,’ the kid says. ‘You were there. At Arrowhead.’ Luke’s face must do something. The kid whistles low like goddamn. Luke worries he’s going to want to talk about it, maybe ask questions that Luke can’t handle. But instead the kid moves forward and reaches for the gate latch. ‘I’m Sam,’ he says. The pit bull goes through the gap in the gate as soon as it’s wide enough to fit her. She hits Luke with her body, that way dogs do like they love you so much they want to mix their atoms together with yours. Luke kneels down to take her hungry affection and give some back. Sam comes through the gate behind her. ‘That’s Manson. She’s a stone killer. Only thing is she doesn’t know it.’ Luke rises, looks towards the light spilling from the house. In the windows, shapes from inside project against the closed curtains. Men standing close to the light so their shadows fill the windows, making them giants, the way they’d always seemed to Luke back when he had lived here and the house was often filled with the huge roaring men of the Devore Combine. ‘Del and them’s talking with this dude Pinkle from out in the desert,’ Sam says, talking low, his eyes gleaming like he’s sharing juicy gossip. ‘Some shit went down out in Hangtree, I think. I think maybe somebody got got.’ A dark thrill runs through Luke at those words, and he thinks about asking more, to find out what really goes on down here. But a wave of panic washes through him at the thought, and he studies the gravel until the moment passes. ‘It’s black hearts only, so they got me on lookout.’ Sam touches his shirt over his heart. ‘I’m due mine soon, for real.’ Black hearts kick up memories of black-ink hearts tattooed over real ones, men laughing and lifting Luke into the air, the taste of ice and root beer. Luke swallows the memories before they swallow him first. He thinks, Please don’t let it happen here. ‘So, should I wait?’ Luke asks. ‘I’ve been driving since dawn, mountain time. I just want to crash.’ ‘Don’t think you’re meant to stay in the big house. Kathy fixed up the trailer out back for you.’ Sam nods to the shape back against the canyon wall. Luke wants to say But my bedroom is there, but he knows it would come out weird and childish. Something about this feels right anyway, that he wouldn’t be let inside. He just nods again. ‘I’ll let them know what’s up when the meeting’s done,’ Sam says. ‘There’s room to park right next to the trailer.’ ‘Thanks.’ The kid touches his shirt over his heart again. ‘Blood is love.’ Somebody says Hey Bobby what’s up Bobby blood is love Bobby in Luke’s head. He’s worried that if he stays out here much longer he’s going to say something strange. So he mumbles some sort of seeya and climbs back into his car. Luke drives up onto the property. As he passes he looks behind him to the back of the house, at the back right corner, the window of his childhood bedroom where he thought he’d be sleeping tonight. The window is dark. He drives through the skeletons of old cars, junk, shadowy and unidentifiable on either side of the gravel. He parks next to the trailer that is his home now. It is covered in brown siding, lifted off the ground with cinderblocks, spear grass growing tall around it. He kills the engine. The dash lights glow for a while. Then they go out. He sits in the darkness and tries to make sense of his insides. Other folk seem to know right away what it is that they’re feeling, have words for it and everything. Luke hardly ever knows how to name the things that swim so huge inside him. He doesn’t know if he is smart or dumb, happy or sad. He doesn’t know what he’s doing or where he is going. All he knows for sure is that he does not belong here. That he is his father’s child but not his son. He watches in the rear-view as Sam pushes shut the gate. It’s like he can hear it shut from here. But of course he can’t. He lets himself into the trailer, bringing in just his backpack and a half-drunk bottle of water. He doesn’t turn on the lights. In the dim he sees the hotplate kitchen, the bathroom with its toilet and shower in the same stall, before falling onto the bed. Sleep comes fast for once. He wakes to the sound of meat and bone colliding. __________________________________ Excerpted from the book THE LAST KING OF CALIFORNIA by Jordan Harper. Copyright © 2024 by Jordan Harper. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved. View the full article

FIRST ASSIGNMENT: Many women struggle once we have children to define where the need to nurture ourselves ends and the responsibility to our children and by extension, our community begins. I was inspired to begin this project because I wanted to explore these relationships and how trauma and self-doubt can skew our sense of self and our view of reality. SOUL WATER SOLE HEIR begins as a devastated woman discovers her missing child is being held in a parallel dimension ruled by a tyrant seeking the final stage of immortality. This ruler must absorb the Soul Water of a direct descendant of pure Nepheshite blood in order to achieve his goal and this woman is his last remaining option. Risking her freedom and her life, the woman navigates dangers in an alternate dimension triggered by greed, indifference, indignation, and politics to save her child only to learn more is at risk. She must decide if it is her responsibility to join the fight to end civil war in her newly discovered native home world and prevent the destruction of the world she calls home. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: Chancellor Barzel, ruler of the Nepheshites, seeks the final stage of immortality reserved for the elites. He must consume the Soul Water of a direct descendant and complete the ritual within the coming year or lose this zenith of existence forever, but no descendants live in his world. After decades of searching, the Order of Absolution locates Barzel’s sole heir living in the Realm of Humans. This heir, Eliana Fortner, is Barzel’s granddaughter who was whisked away as an infant by Hokmani, one of Barzel’s most trusted courtesans. Hokmani took the infant from the arms of her dying mother. She couldn’t bear to have her last surviving child subjected to a life of serving as Barzel’s breeding courtesan or worse, being interned in the River of Souls. Then Hokmani with her own surviving child, Kavua, joined the Balamsian rebels fighting the bloody war to end the brutal quest for immortality. The passage of an adult between the Nepheshite world and the Human Realm requires the individual to open and enter a Pyramid of Radiance portal willingly. So in a desperate attempt to facilitate Barzel’s ascension, the Order of Absolution kidnaps Eliana’s daughter and uses her as bait. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: River of Immortal Souls Soul Water and Sole Heir Soul Harvester: River of Immortality FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: Missing Daughter by Rick Mofina (2019) for missing children & mystery meets The Library of the Dead (2022) for portal travel & lost souls The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker (2013) for female protag, family & portal travel Witchmark by C.I. Polk (2018) for fantasy, romance & world war NOTE: The project might also appeal to fans of N.K. Jemisin (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms), Samantha Shannon (The Priory of the Orange Tree), Tasha Suri (Empire of Sand), Robert Jordan (Wheet of Time), and Terry Brookes (Shannara Series) FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: The sole heir of an interdimensional tyrannical ruler must stop the consumption of her missing daughter’s soul and prevent the enslavement of humanity. SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: Inner Conflict: Eliana needs to feel loved in spite of being betrayed by her husband who is moving on with a pregnant fiancé even though the divorce isn’t final. She blames herself for asking Paul to pick Deidre up from school instead of leaving her job as originally planned. She blames herself for not being strong/good enough to hold onto Paul through the pain of losing Deidre. And she even wonders whether there was something wrong with her that caused her biological mother and father to throw her away. Maybe she doesn’t deserve to be loved. Hypothetical Inner Conflict Scenario: Deidre is safe in the Balamsian camp but has been brainwashed to believe that Eliana abandoned her in the woods, leaving her to die. Eliana and Deidre argue causing Eliana to question whether all this happened because she failed as a mother. Eliana’s response is to run away and sulk providing the perfect opportunity for Deidre to sneak out of their confined quarters in an attempt to run back to Barzel. When Deidre is recaptured by the Balamsian patrol and taken to Hokmani, a wise mother who suffered great loss, Eliana listens to Hokmani explain the error of Deidre conclusions. In the process, Eliana begins to evaluate how she feels about her worthiness to be a mother. Secondary Conflict: Eliana wants to be in control, often at the expense of reading other people’s feelings. This is a protection mechanism to stay her fear has served her well in her goal of being totally self-reliant and doing so with the precision of a perfectionist. Hypothetical Secondary Conflict Scenario: Eliana drops out of Pyramid of Radiance portal in the woods near home like a sack of potatoes landing with a thud. Half crawling and limping, she drags herself up the back stairs of the house with only enough strength to lay on the porch and bang on the locked door with frustration. Who the hell locked the door that she deliberately left open since she was only going for a short walk!?!?!? To her surprise, Cameron cautiously looks through the glass and rushes to help her into the house. He stayed at her house, searching the woods, and praying for her safe return even though the police and Paul hadn’t taken his concerns seriously. When he tries to console Eliana or offer aid, just like when they were kids, Eliana shoves him away and talks over him, ignoring his attempts to show her how much he cares. She’s oblivious to the pain in eyes or the bent shoulders from the rejection and she charges ahead to activate a plan to get back to Deidre. No woman is an island, but she doesn’t seem to understand that. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: Human World: Eliana’s home base is located in the Pacific Northwest on a thickly wooded small island with approximately sixteen thousand inhabitants. There’s a small village near the ferry docks with a few much-appreciated restaurants, a well-stocked grocery store, and boutique shops. Eliana is the principal at the one public high school that is highly regarded throughout universities across the country. She lives within walking distance of the 240-acre Grand Forest which is a setting steeped in local mystical legends where some have been known not to return from. Land of Nahar Am: The hidden land of Nahar Am is accessible through a portal open only to those tied to the mystical world of water. It was once a beautiful and peaceful land benevolently ruled by the magical Iyrin who were worshiped by the Balamsians. The Iyrin Temple was located in the middle of a jungle but visible from the sea to the west. It was an honor for any Balamsian to make the annual pilgrimage to the temple to present the fruits of their labors. Life was simple and the Iyrin prevented pestilence and disease, providing for the basic needs of the inhabitants. Technological advances were few and weapons other than swords and spears used to defend against wild animals was all that was needed. Life as the Balamsians knew if was destroyed when the Nepheshites from a distant kingdom adjacent to Nahar Am invaded seeking the secrets held by the Iyrin for an eternity… the secret to immortality. The Nepheshite conquerors killed all but a handful of the Iyrin forcing them to uncover how to adapt their science for use by the Nepheshite elite. The Nepheshites saw no reason to destroy the temple, so it fell into disrepair with only the shell to represent what has once been a great civilization. Nepheshite Supreme Ruler Barzel was so enthralled with achieving immortality that his only interest in the Balamsians was interning the young in the River of Immortal Souls to achieve his ultimate goal. He ordered Balamsians slaves to extend the Iyrin complex over the River of Immortal Souls and called it the Citadel. In this place he set up his home and installed a garrison of elite soldiers to allow the Iyrin research to continue without interruption. And he harnessed the volcanic fires on the island to the south of the Citadel for power. A walled city for the Nepheshites was created to the west of the Citadel where all manner of temptation and vice was entertained without question. The surviving Balamsians fled during the war forming four clans: Bal Clan of the North, Bal Clan of the Green, Bal Clan of the East, and Bal Clan of the Seas. But one rebel group made the decision to fight for freedom. Beyond the ruined remains of a Balamsian village far to the west, they uncovered a secret passage behind a waterfall. Descending more than 100 steps from the plateau, the passage opened into a forested area. The Balamsian rebels built a raised encampment in the tree canopy to house their warrior Protectors and families. Life was hard living in the trees, but it afforded them critical protection and allowed them to conduct clandestine patrols and launch attacks against the Nepheshites. So had life continued in the land of Nahar Am for more than three hundred years, but change is the horizon when a young mother discovers that she was born in another dimension and her child has been kidnapped to lure her back.

Writers usually want to give an indication of what their characters look like to help readers visualize them. But that’s just basic. A really useful description, beyond offering much about the character, also reveals the feelings of the person seeing him and her as well as hints that will affect the development of the story. I’ll start with two well-known passages about young women in bathing suits. Philip Roth “Goodbye, Columbus” The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. Then she stepped out to the edge of the diving board and looked foggily into the pool; it could have been drained, myopic Brenda would never have known it. She dove beautifully, and a moment later she was swimming back to the side of the pool, her head of short-clipped auburn hair held up, straight ahead of her, as though it were a rose on a long stem. The rose glided dry to the edge and then it was beside me. “Thank you,” she said, her eyes watery though not from the water. She extended a hand for her glasses but did not put them on until she turned and headed away. I watched her move off. Her hands suddenly appeared behind her. She caught the bottom of her suit between thumb and index finger and flicked what flesh had been showing back where it belonged. My blood jumped. This paragraph opening the piece establishes much about Brenda and the observing narrator. Until the shock of the final sentence it seems to be a visual telling of what he sees. Those sudden three words reveal how captivated he is. What he has seen should prepare the reader for the why of his attraction. The sensual gesture of her flicked flesh is certainly one reason, a gesture that she may have performed for him. He has also used the floral metaphor of her head as a rose. Before then her dive has been beautiful. But he has also emphasized her myopia. She does not see at all clearly, and how will that fact affect the story to come? John Updike, “A&P” She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your [bathing suit] straps down, I suppose it's the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was. The straps down, though not as overt as Brenda’s flick, is provocative, at least as interpreted by the narrator, who also judges her prim face as a control of the sexuality of her straps. Her stretched neck is more questionable than Brenda’s rose stem. This narrator’s wanting more of her is a more aesthetic reaction than a blood jump. Brenda has also established a relationship with her narrator by asking him to hold her glasses, and her bathing suit is appropriate for a pool. That garment is a supermarket is transgressive. Is this narrator being taunted in a different way? Alice Munro, “What Is Remembered” Instead, she looked at Pierre and the bush doctor. Pierre was talking with a boyish liveliness she didn’t often see in him these days. She occupied herself by pretending that she was seeing him for the first time now. His curly, short-cropped, very dark hair receding at the temples, baring the smooth, gold-tinged ivory skin. His wide, sharp shoulders and long, fine limbs and nicely shaped, rather small skull. He smiled enchantingly but never to charm, and seemed to distrust smiling altogether since he had become a teacher of boys. Faint lines of permanent fret were set in his forehead. So many physical details about Pierre would be excessive in a different circumstance, if they came from a third person narrator. But the woman observing him is rediscovering him, trying connect the man in front of her now and all that is different about him with the person she has known in the past. Being a teacher seems the reason for his changes, with his distrust of smiling and his lines of fret. This paragraph establishes a mystery about Pierre, one that seems important for the woman and their future relationship. Tessa Hadley, “Because the Night” Peggy was small and compact with pale skin and big eyes with thin, sensitive lids; she had a mass of red hair, just beginning to be threaded with grey, which was always a statement however she wore it: loose, or pinned up with ribbons, or in a swinging plait. Kristen was small and pale like her mother but her hair was nondescript. Peggy dressed brilliantly, too, in green dungarees and striped satin shirts and old flowered party dresses from junk shops: this was one of the things that made her stand out from the company wives at the parties (by this time Jim had moved on from Anglia World to Transglobal Services). Although this description emphasizes Peggy and the characteristics of features and hair that make her special, it conveys two additional points. Seemingly more significant is the contrast with her daughter’s nondescript hair, unlike her mother’s red mass that made a statement. Will a tension erupt between mother and daughter, who gets only one sentence in contrast to so much about Peggy? The parenthetical fact about Jim’s job change calls attention to itself, hinting at a future role in the character relationships. E.M. Forster, “The Purple Envelope” On the morning of his twenty-first birthday Howard shaved himself with particular care. He scraped his fat cheeks till they shone and smarted, he pursued an imaginary beard far down his neck, and then, taking hold of his small yellow moustache, he combed it and waxed it and pulled it till it was as straight as a ruler and as sharp as a needle. “After all, I don’t look such an ass,” he thought. For he had a very proper wish to be handsome and terrible and manlike, now that he was a man. It was a cold morning, and the little shaving-glass became coated with his breath. Clearly, Howard is seeking to transform himself and achieve a goal of manhood as he makes his mustache sharp as a needle. But other details and the words used to describe them undermine his effort. His fat cheeks are scraped with the razor until they sting, and the mirror obscures his face. This paragraph gives him a goal, preparing a story that will test him. Mona Simpson, “Wrong Object” If pressed, what could I have said? That K was slender and nearly bald. That he was in his forties. He dressed in the style of our Southern California community: good hard shoes but no jacket. Often he wore a gray, collared sweater, soft, close fitting. Probably cashmere. I wondered where he bought it. The shirts my husband chose faintly bothered me. Here a narrator is testing herself to describe—primarily to herself—a man it seems she does not know well, providing clear details such as his age and baldness, but speculating on other aspects. His sweater cashmere, suggesting expensive, followed up by wishing she knew the store he bought it. She is curious about K, wanting to know more. The final sentence may be the most significant as it reveals a dissatisfaction with her husband through his clothing. Will K compensate in some way and, if so, to what extent? Jamel Brinkley, “No More Than a Bubble” We approached the girls, pointed to our stickers to introduce ourselves, and asked for their names. The tall one with the Afro said her name was Iris and did so with her nose, putting unusually strong emphasis on the I. True to this utterance, she seemed the more insistent and lunatic of the two. She vibrated. We asked where they were from. Most of Iris’s family came from Belize. Her friend with the buzz cut, Sybil, was Dominican. Claudius and I liked to know these kinds of things. This paragraph, like the Simpson, is based on an overt curiosity, in this case that of two men about two women that have just met at party. The only physical detail for each woman has to do with their hair, but much more attention is given to Iris—her pronunciation, which is interpreted as lunatic, she as vibrating. The explanation of wanting to know suggests a path to control. But can insistent Iris be controlled? Curiosity dominates through these description examples, most directly when a first person narrator seeks to know about someone else, but when the narration is third person, that narrator seems to be imparting what it assumes the reader would be curious about. These paragraphs deliver knowns that prepare for all the unknowns in the story to come.

1.) The Act of Story Statement Stop her violent thoughts from manifesting in reality before they can do irreversible damage. 2.) Antagonist/Antagonistic Force The primary antagonistic force in The Fog Descends is Leila Howard’s own thoughts. From the moment we meet Leila, the violent thoughts that are product of her OCD are the power that stands between her and peace. When her father dies, this force explodes in magnitude as her thoughts begin to actually affect the physical world, causing irreversible harm. Jamie Franklin provides another antagonistic presence. Though Leila and Jamie wouldn’t necessarily be categorized as antagonists by themselves, they become each other’s antagonists upon meeting. Leila’s abilities short-circuit Jamie’s fact-driven mind and she becomes the obstacle that stands between him and his ability to cope with reality. Meanwhile, Leila desperately needs someone to believe her, show her kindness, and help her escape the torments of her mind. However, Jamie’s cold treatment of Leila leads him to become a major obstacle to her healing. 3.) Breakout Title The Fog Descends 4.) Comparable Titles In Excess of Dark visits Midnight Mass while paying fiery homage to Carrie. 5.) Logline When a young woman’s violent thoughts begin physically manifesting in reality, she confides in a man whose desperation for understanding and hunger for control will put countless lives at risk and leave her more dangerous than ever. 6.) Conditions of Inner Conflict INNER CONFLICT Internal conflict is the dark heart of this story. Since this story is told from two POVs, there are two driving internal conflicts: Leila Howard – Intrusive, violent thoughts have plagued Leila’s entire life, eating away at her psyche until, at a tragically young age, she stopped believing she was a good person. Upon being diagnosed with OCD, Leila learns to cope with her pain, motivated by the knowledge that she is not alone and that they “are just thoughts.” When her father is killed, everything changes. The depth of Leila’s grief unleashes a power within her that causes her greatest fear to come true: her intrusive thoughts begin physically manifesting in reality. As Leila becomes a danger to everyone in her life, she is slowly torn apart by the undeniable fact that she isn’t experiencing the nightmare: she is the nightmare. Jamie Franklin – Jamie’s childhood has left him obsessed with control and understanding. He believes that people are nothing more than concoctions of chemicals and has spent his career as a psychiatrist fueled by the knowledge that there is always an explanation. However, when he encounters a patient who displays abilities he cannot comprehend, his worldview teeters on the edge and he desperately attempts to keep it from plummeting. Hypothetical Scenario (Leila) – On the night of her father’s funeral, Leila’s thoughts physically alter reality for the first time. As her drunk mother stumbles away, Leila is overcome by grief, anger, and abandonment. Suddenly, a “fog descends” and reality is replaced by a terrible image. Pain and heat engulf her mind and even as she can feel her body stationary on the couch, she watches a horrific scene unfold that leaves her mother hospitalized. Hypothetical Scenario (Jamie) – While trying to acclimate to the small town of Citrine, Colorado, Jamie decides to attend service at Saint Peter’s Church of All Faith: the local church with an infamous history. During the service, the young pastor sermonizes that “knowledge could not expand without darkness to expand into.” The very reminder that there are things in the world beyond comprehension triggers Jamie, causing him to flee the church as he remembers the patient whom he could not save. SECONDARY CONFLICT The secondary conflict is the relationship between Jamie and Leila. While they both share the same goal of putting a stop to Leila’s preternatural abilities, the inherent conflict between their motivations gives rise to dangerous resentment. Leila is living proof of something beyond comprehension, which is Jamie’s greatest fear, while Jamie’s cold treatment of Leila as some terrible mistake only fuels her violence and anguish. Hypothetical Scenario – Jamie is convinced that if he is able to see Leila’s brain activity, he will be able to understand her “episodes” and diagnosis her “illness.” He pulls strings and juggles lies in order to gain use of an fMRI machine at the hospital. When the scan shows brain activity that is utterly impossible, Jamie confronts the doctor and is left humiliated. After dragging Leila from the hospital, Jamie speeds down the mountain roads that claimed the life of Leila’s father, and Leila breaks down in tears, asking Jamie why he didn’t just stay away from her in the first place if he hated her this much. Jamie responds with a heart-wrenching blow: “staying away would not have changed your existence. And that is the problem here.” 7.) The Incredible Importance of Setting Citrine, Colorado is the epitome of a small town: insignificant to the world, yet so full, it is its own world. With a population of just under 3,000, Citrine rests on the shore of Lake Stephen, a magnificent body of water, cradled within the mountains. Citrine’s Main Street spans only four blocks. Some of the storefronts and restaurants are reminiscent of other places and times: the town’s only club could have been designed by Gatsby himself; the bizarre surf shop looks like a misplaced piece of California; the cozy Irish Pub could be in the highlands; and the local coffee shop’s twinkling lights and fresh French pastries invoke dreams of Paris. Other buildings are pure Citrine: The small antique shop; Sam’s Hardware Store; The Old Theatre and it’s burnt out marquee; the strangely elegant and well-kept Town Hall; and the white Oak walls of Saint Peter’s Church of All Faith, the town’s infamous place of worship. While Citrine used to be a summer tourist destination for families living in Denver and Colorado Springs, it now has more past than future. The commercial hotels on the outskirts of town have been shut down and scheduled for demolition and an entire block of storefronts sits boarded-up and abandoned. Everything that remains – though still charming – has an underlying sense of decline. But the part of Citrine that reeks strongest of decay are the very roads that lead in and out of town. Tormented by the harsh winters, the cement has been left fractured, split open, and covered with potholes the size of craters. During the harshest days of winter, the roads are often left untreated, becoming so treacherous that the town becomes inaccessible for 24-72 hours at a time. No one goes in. No one gets out. Luckily, there is a bigger town called Fayetteville just 12-miles away (though the twisting, winding roads make it feel much further). Fayetteville is a familiar suburban sprawl. Many residents in Citrine work in Fayetteville and rely on it for everything from grocery shopping to getting their teeth cleaned. Citrine’s heartbeat is slowing, and Fayetteville is like it’s pacemaker: providing enough support to keep the small town running. Except, that is, during those periods in the dead of winter, when Citrine is truly on its own.

In the summer of 1995, I was living in a country at war. Where I kept my billet, in the westernmost province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the worst atrocities had been committed two years before my arrival. Nevertheless, it was amid the blast craters and bullet holes of Mostar, a demolished city that now lay under a psycho-terror siege of random mortar launches and sporadic sniper shots, that I began to recognize “the problem of evil” as an obstacle to religious faith. The tales of horror I heard in Mostar were moral quicksand. I kept my head above the horror by floating the surface of it in a cracked shell of professionalism, refusing either to believe or disbelieve the story of those Catholic nuns who claimed to have been captured by a unit of so-called četniks, gang-raped until each was pregnant, then given a choice between abortion, suicide, and bearing a Serb bastard. For me, it was enough to dip my toes in the citywide seep of sadness that lingered after the very public deaths of a young Muslim mother and her two children, blown apart by a direct missile strike as they attempted to flee down the Neretva River in a rubber raft. I could deflect everything except the expressions of the orphans on street corners. Seven and eight years old, they stood smoking cigarettes and flipping off passersby with a stony insolence that you couldn’t have wiped off their faces with an assault rifle. Looking into their agate eyes, I knew it was too late for us all. Picking a path through the gigantic pile of scorched rubble that had once been Mostar’s city center, a place where two years earlier Catholic and Muslim survivors of the Serbian bombardment had fought each other with artillery at close range, I asked myself, as so many had before me, “How can a God who is all-knowing, allpowerful, and all-good abide such depravity?” And what about justice? Maybe God wasn’t who I thought he was. Maybe God wasn’t, period. It didn’t help my sleep that the most impressive people I met that summer made a point of telling me that the Devil, at least, was real. The first to speak these words was Mirjana Soldo, a religious visionary in Medjugorje, the Bosnian Croat “peace center” twelve miles from Mostar. There, a rapturous cult of devotion had formed around apparitions of the Virgin Mary that were already the most controversial and closely observed purported supernatural phenomena to appear on earth in at least a half century. As Mirjana urged me to recognize the Devil as an actual being who was determined to steal my soul, her pale blue eyes seemed to darken, and her expression became a discomfiting combination of pity and reproach. My sense was that she felt obliged to give me a warning she knew I wouldn’t heed. Rita Klaus was more successful in suspending my disbelief. A large, handsome, white-haired woman from Pittsburgh, Klaus was famous for her spontaneous healing from an advanced case of multiple sclerosis, the most celebrated and thoroughly documented of the many medical miracles associated with Medjugorje. Klaus had seemed to appear out of nowhere one afternoon in the village’s parish office. She sat down across from me, leaned over the table, laid a hand on mine, and introduced herself with these words: “Satan exists.” I felt as if I had been shot with some drug that causes a temporary paralysis. Klaus seemed to wait until the effect was complete before continuing: “The evil inside you comes from temptation. You have to make a decision, either for the good or for the bad. So the evil is inside us, as you believe, but it’s also out there, and believe me, it is very real and very pervasive.” Klaus then told me the story of a diabolic attack on her family that had begun when one of her daughters began to experiment with a Ouija board. The part that disturbed me most at the time, and that would haunt me later, involved a series of attacks on Klaus and her family by something that took the form of a large black dog with red eyes. “I don’t want to scare you, but I think you need to hear my story,” Klaus told me at one point. The emphasis she put on the word “need” troubled me. The person I admired more than anyone I met in Medjugorje was a Franciscan priest named Slavko Barbarić, spiritual adviser to Mirjana and the other visionaries. Shortly after my meeting with Rita Klaus, Father Slavko attempted to breach my skepticism with a phenomenological report. Slavko was, among other things, an intellectual whose multiple PhDs included one in psychology. He lowered my guard by admitting straight out his own reluctance to believe in supernatural evil, then described the series of events that had changed his mind. One experience that made a deep impression involved his participation in the exorcism of a woman who was able to distinguish consecrated hosts from those that had not been consecrated. He and the other priests participating in the exorcism each had left the room on multiple occasions, Slavko recalled, only to return a few minutes later with either a wafer that had been consecrated or one that had not yet been blessed. The woman who lay on the bed never reacted once when they came into the room with an unconsecrated host, Slavko told me, but went into paroxysms of writhing and cursing whenever a consecrated host came near her. “What in her could possibly have known the difference?” Slavko asked. In reply, I simply shook my head. I was to witness an exorcism myself only a few days later. I’ve attempted to deconstruct that experience many times in the years since, mainly in the hope that I would be able to put it out of my mind. Those I’ve spoken to about it always make reference to the “altered state” I was in at the time. I don’t deny this. That night and the days leading up to it were almost unbearable in their intensity. The Youth Festival Mass in which the exorcism occurred was the most fervid and enthralling religious service I’ve ever experienced. The thousand or so young adults who made their way to Medjugorje from all over the world had braved warnings from the United Nations and the European Union that the situation was especially unstable at the moment and that travel to the former Yugoslavia was “strongly discouraged.” The Croats were mobilizing for a final push against the Serbs, and the climax of the war was upon us. A sense that the armies of light were rallying against the forces of darkness imbued that evening’s mass from the moment it began. Father Slavko was as I’d never seen him before, ferocious in his ardor, swinging an enormous gilded monstrance and the consecrated host within like a holy weapon as he stormed through the crowd. Each time Slavko turned the monstrance in a new direction, repeating the words “Body of Christ,” I heard an eruption of bone-chilling noises from out of the crowd, shrieks of agony and gasps of terror, animal howls and loud, throaty curses. There were several raspy barks of “Fuck you!” The choir on the stage behind Slavko only sang louder, faces aglow with the conviction of imminent victory. As Slavko approached, his expression frightened me; the gaunt priest’s reliably warm gaze was replaced by a piercing glare. He pointed the monstrance directly at me and in a booming voice shouted, “Jesus!” It was as close as I’ve ever come to keeling over in a dead faint. The roars of rage and cries of pain seemed to be swelling around me. A young woman standing perhaps twenty feet to my left began to produce a noise unlike any I’d ever heard, a cough so dry and deep that it sounded as if she was trying to bring up a lung. It went on and on, like an echo that did not fade but rather amplified. She bent over, then shuddered uncontrollably, a white foam issuing from her mouth in a copious stream. She dropped to the ground, kicking and writhing, and began to scream obscenities. I heard “Fuck you, Jesus,” in very clear English, but also curses—or what I assumed were curses—in a variety of languages I did not recognize. The girl’s voice became impossibly deep and guttural, and the white lather continued to pour from her mouth. A crowd of people gathered around, reciting the exorcism prayer of Pope Leo XIII. At one point, the girl on the ground seemed to go still and silent, but then her screams started up again, louder than ever, gruesomely desperate. At the moment of what I could sense as a climax, she arched her back into a position that not even a world-class gymnast could have held, impossibly extended, with her weight resting entirely on her heels and the crown of her head, and let forth a hoarse, croaking expulsion of breath that must have emptied her lungs utterly. It was the smell, though, that shocked me, a ghastly stench that was like the exponential product of rotted flesh. In that moment I became utterly convinced that something was leaving her, that what I had just witnessed was not emotional or psychological or imaginary but real, whatever that meant. I remember very little of what happened next, just blurred images of the girl being helped to her feet and led away, of Slavko finishing the mass, of the shining faces of the choir as they sang. I have no idea how I made it back to the Pansion Maja, into my room, and out onto the tiny balcony where I awoke at dawn, sprawled on the concrete floor, shivering with cold and happy in a way that was completely unfamiliar. Two days later I was in Rome, on my way home. It was mid-August, and to escape the suffocating heat I sought the cooling mists of the Fountain of the Four Rivers on the Piazza Navona. I was leaning against the back of a bench when I noticed an elegantly dressed man walking through a sea of tourists, T-shirt vendors, and street performers that seemed to part before him. He wore a beautifully cut blue blazer with cream linen trousers, a bright yellow cravat, and sharp-toed loafers polished to a high gloss. “Quite the gent,” I thought, then drew a quick breath when I saw the man’s face. His aquiline features were formed into the strangest expression I’d ever seen, a sort of malevolent drollery that did not entirely mask the suffocating rage beneath it. Though all by himself, the man began to speak in a loud voice as he drew near me, in a language that was not Italian. Heart pounding, I glanced at the tourists nearby, baffled by their lack of a reaction. Not one of them seemed to have noticed this jarring oddity moving among them. It was as if, somehow, the silver-haired man and I had been isolated from the scene surrounding us. Suddenly, he let loose with a mad cackle and turned his head slightly to fix me with one eye. In that moment, I felt absolutely certain he wasn’t human. I knew it. An unearthly calm came over me almost immediately. Why I can’t say, but I reached inside my shirt to grasp the scapular medal I had taken to wearing that summer, stared back at him, and whispered, “You can’t touch me.” He responded with an obscene leer. I understood exactly what he said then: “I’ll catch you later.” After returning home, I spoke to no one about the . . . creature I had encountered on the Piazza Navona. In time, the indelibility of that summer began to fade. Within a couple of years, the only thing I understood better than before was how much of memory is conviction. And by then, the practical advantages all seemed to be on the side of doubt. To claim that I had encountered a diabolical entity on the Piazza Navona made me sound either crazy or foolish—even to myself. It wasn’t good for business. I was aided immeasurably in my will to forget by the television broadcast of a “live exorcism” on a network news magazine. The contrived staging and cornball theatrics of this TV event served only to highlight the abject need for an audience that drove not only the show’s producers but also the grandiose exorcist and his dim-witted subject. There wasn’t enough self-awareness in the thing to raise it even to the level of farce. I thought, “What if my own state of mind is the main difference between what I witnessed in Bosnia and what I’m seeing now?” Even to allow this as a possibility undermined my recollection of that night in Medjugorje. And because my numinous moments from the summer of 1995 were never repeated, it became easier and easier to tell myself that the extraordinary stresses and sympathies I experienced in Bosnia had induced bizarre perceptions of what were probably half-imagined shadows of a truth beyond my understanding. Or some such shit. While I didn’t really believe this new version of my story, I didn’t really believe the story I had come home with, either. It soon seemed both possible and preferable to shroud my memories in a haze of ambiguity. My four-year-old son chased me out of that cloud. Gabriel got into bed next to me one morning, then whispered in my ear that something terrifying had happened to him during the night. A big black dog with red eyes, he said, came into his room and bit his baby blanket, the silk-banded square of blue flannel he had slept with since birth. My little boy was shaking as he spoke these words. When I hugged him close and tried to tell him that sometimes our dreams seem so real to us that we think they actually happened, he went quiet for a few moments, then told me plaintively that it wasn’t a dream, that he knew it wasn’t a dream, that it was real. When I tried again to talk about how affected a child can be by the things he imagines seeing in the night, Gabe became angry and demanded to know why I was trying to make him think he didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. “The dog was real, even if it wasn’t a real dog,” he told me. I let it go then, though the subject continued to come up from time to time, always when my son raised it. He seemed to have a need to talk about it. I tried several other times to suggest that what he had experienced was a very vivid, powerful dream, but this inevitably infuriated him. When he was five, he saw a psychologist who told him about the night terrors that younger children often experience, and how these take place in a zone between waking and sleeping. Gabe seemed to find some comfort in this notion, but within the year he again brought up the black dog that had bit his baby blanket when he was four and insisted once more that what had happened was real, not a dream or even a night terror. I was ready for him this time, and answered with the suggestion that I might have told his mom a story I heard from a woman I met in Bosnia about a black dog with red eyes that had terrorized her family. He might have overheard this story when he was very young, I went on, and later somehow half-dreamed and half-imagined a similar experience. “So now you think I’m crazy?” he asked. No, no, no, I assured him: all our heads are full not only of thoughts we know about, what we call the conscious mind, but also of thoughts we don’t know about, what we call the unconscious mind, and when those two mix, we can have experiences that seem completely real to us but not to anyone else. “So you’re saying that it wasn’t really real,” my son accused. I didn’t know what I was saying and shook my head in confused frustration. “It happened,” Gabe told me. “I know it happened.” He gave me a measuring look that I’d never seen from him before. I knew it was a big moment for us both. “You believe me, don’t you, Dad?” my son asked finally. I stared into his eyes for some time before answering, “I believe you.” That was the last time we ever talked about it. It was also, for me I think, the beginning of this book. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Devil’s Best Trick by Randall Sullivan. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved. View the full article

At seventeen thousand feet and halfway from India to China, pilot Joseph Dechene had lost both his aircraft’s engines to ice. His lumbering cargo plane was now a glider. With white, ice-laden clouds pressed tight against the glass of its windows, the cockpit was like the inside of a bathysphere, a contraption of glass and metal churning in an abyss. The violence of the winds aloft had blown the plane so far off course that the pilots and radio operator had no idea where they were, knowing only that the peaks of high mountains were somewhere close below. Shining a light through the cockpit window, they could see ice building on the wings, but as they did, a lurch of turbulence, the worst the experienced senior pilot had ever encountered, heaved the plane upward “like an express train,” as he reported. “We came busting out the top of the thunderhead at 20,000 feet with twenty-four tons of airplane and no engine.” Above the clouds, he got the engines running again and so, eventually, safely concluded another trip over the Hump. “The Hump” was the name that U.S. airmen had given to one the most perilous aviation missions of WW2: flying transport planes overloaded with gasoline, materiel and other supplies from India to China in the little known China-Burma-India (CBI) theater. The Japanese capture of Burma (now Myanmar) in April 1942, had closed the Burma Road, the last effective land route into China, whose ports were already in Japanese hands. President Roosevelt had pledged that no “matter what . . . ways will be found to deliver airplanes and munitions of war to the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek,” and with the closure of the Burma Road the only remaining way was by air. Unfortunately for the U.S. airmen tasked to the fly the untested transport aircraft, the route from northeast India to Kunming, China passed through a unique convergence of deadly weather systems—and over the foothills of the Himalayas. As the expected accidents piled up, airmen spoke darkly of “the aluminum trail” of wreckage that lay scattered across mountainsides and deep jungle beneath their path. “Below us was jungle,” recalled pilot Don Downie of his departures from his air base in Assam, India. “Personally I would sweat out this part of the trip even more than over the actual mountains. At least if you hit a hill, you had no struggle to get out.” By ‘getting out’ he meant surviving a crash or bail-out in the jungle and having to try to walk out. The first such bail-out had occurred on November 18, 1942, on a return flight from Yunnan-yi, an air field 130 miles west of Kunming, to Assam. “The airplane ran into a very severe storm,” recalled radio-operator Matt Campanella. “[I]t was completely engulfed with fog plus heavy icing conditions” and the plane was soon lost. “The pilot, his face ashen bluish-gray from lack of oxygen and strain, ordered the co-pilot and myself to bail out.” As the plane lurched and slipped, losing altitude, the two men hurriedly put on their parachutes. They were at about 16,000 feet. Campanella grabbed his .45, a flashlight, and a unit of “K” rations and canteen, while the co-pilot, Lt. Cecil Williams, radioed that by order of the pilot, they were bailing-out. At the rear of the plane, the men fumbled with the doors, fighting to get one open, then stood in the gaping space. White-out conditions completely obscured whatever lay below, whether mountain peaks or the jungle. “I asked, “Who’s going first? The Lt. answered, “We’ll jump together.” We interlocked arms. The Lt. looked back at me and asked, “All set?” “Set, I replied.” As the men jumped, Campanella was instantly knocked out, perhaps by striking the door or even the tail of the plane, briefly gained consciousness, then blacked out again. He came to his senses on top of a tree some seventy-five feet above the ground with no memory of having opened his parachute. From the darkness, Lt. Williams was calling to him and the men realized they were in the same tree. As Campanella unbuckled his ‘chute, he fell to the ground, where his landing was cushioned by underbrush and vines. Lt. Williams climbed down, a painfully slow process in the darkness, taking hours. By midnight both men were on the ground together, unharmed. Over the next twelve days the airmen wandered in the forest. By the fourth day they had exhausted their rations. Coming upon a stream, they followed its course until it became a river bounded by towering cliffs, and they swam across. Both men had lost their shoes and were now barefoot and hobbled along on makeshift crutches until, one day, as Campanella reported, “we fell to our knees and prayed God that this day we might see people and civilization of some sort.” That afternoon two native men appeared in the forest, and after an exchange of sign languages led the lost Americans to their village, a tiny compound composed of four bamboo huts inhabited by some forty souls. “They appeared to be of a mixed Chinese-Indian type,” Campanella reported. “They seemed to speak a Hindustani dialect.” Hospitably received and generously fed, the airmen recovered. On their third day in the village, runners bearing notes written by the airmen were dispatched to they knew not where; and on the eighth day the soundof a low-flying plane was heard overhead. Shortly after the pilot walked in to report he had made a precarious landing in a small buffalo pasture just beyond the village, but for the return flight it would necessary to clear a longer runway for take-off. The plane, a little PT-17 biplane used as a trainer, was so tiny it could not carry both men on one trip. Safely back at their air base the rescued men learned that the village runner had brought their message to Fort Hertz, a remote British outpost in the far north of Burma that—by air—was only some sixty-five miles away from where they had fallen from the sky. The men also learned that it was now December 10, and that they had been lost for 23 days and their names inscribed on the memorial list posted on their squadron bulletin board. By the end of the war the U.S. Air Forces’ Air Transport Command had ferried an estimated 700,000 tons over the Hump. Officially, 594 transport planes were lost in the airlift, a figure that is almost certainly incomplete given the less than rigorous record-keeping: for one thing, very few reports were filed for aircraft lost before June 1943. Estimates of crew killed or missing range from 1,659 to 3861, and an astonishing 1,200 are estimated to have survived bail-outs over the mountains and jungle. The aims of the deadly air mission had been twofold: to support Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces combat the Japanese and so prevent the “collapse” of China, and to ensure Roosevelt’s dream of a warm alliance between the U.S. and—as it was presumed—Nationalist China after the war. At war’s end many airmen questioned these objectives. Pilot James Segel probably spoke for many when he pointed out that even if China had collapsed and gone over to the Japanese, “China alone was a major headache to control, as there were many regional warlords with private armies, who were experienced in fighting guerilla wars. They could keep the Japanese military very busy.” His conclusion was that “[o]nce started, the CBI campaign was taken for granted as an essential military operation.” Today modern advances have left the aviation epic behind. Military transports now carry payloads of 85 tons, against the Hump’s ‘giant’ C-54 aircraft’s typical six-ton payload, while the payload of the Soviet Antonov An-225 Mriya is an astounding 253 tons. All the elemental features that made the Hump route so formidable are indeed unchanged—the monsoon and winds from Asia still slam against the Himalayas—but aircraft today simply fly above them. ___________________________________ From SKIES OF THUNDER by CAROLINE ALEXANDER, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2024 by Caroline Alexander View the full article

Latin American crime rates are triple the world average and centuries of art can be found throughout the region, often unprotected or with minimal security. Crimes related to high value art and antiquities often involve cunning schemes and intriguing news reports. The abundance of pre-Columbian sites potentially well-stocked with artifacts make them a rich target for looters. In the novel Five Days in Bogotá, fictional looters offer Ally an abundance of artifacts from sites in Northern Colombia. The absence or lack effective on-site security allows easy plundering. Governments and anthropologists are discovering sites with digital tools like drones with Lidar. Dealers in illegal artifacts also use these tools to explore remote areas with difficult access. Networks of looters and their sponsors have created a criminal web where artifacts disappear into private hands for resell to collectors or legitimate buyers like museums who can authenticate these objects but not their provenance. I visited a collector in Lima whose collection covered the walls and ceilings of his home and spread to a walk-in vault installed in a back building. The collection included colonial paintings from the 1600-1700s, a solid silver altar from a Catholic church, a necklace made of twenty real-sized gold peanuts from the Tombs of Sipan discovered in 1988 and much more. The collector claimed it was legal to pay site looters if the objects did not leave Peru. This astonishing accumulation had to involve more than a Peruvian who loved his country’s cultural history. Colonial-era objects are vulnerable for similar reasons. Isolated churches and monasteries abandoned or little used for centuries become easy targets. In 2000, the San Diego Museum of Art purchased Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1728) from a Mexican dealer for $45,000. When museum curators discovered a listing identifying the painting that had been cut from its frame and stolen from a remote church in the state of Hidalgo, they returned it to the Mexican government for an investigation. Approximately 600,000 works in Mexico alone have been registered which allows experts to determine ownership, but just as many or more are not listed for Mexico alone. Imagine the art treasure trove in Latin America. The forgery market in Latin America began in Mexico in the 1800s when pre-Columbian objects were purchased by American and European museums anxious to have encyclopedic collections from exotic places including the Americas. Acquisition specialists had little scholarly research to authenticate objects. Today many fakes can be found in important museum collections. They are more easily spotted when compared to works that came directly from legitimate archeological digs. Looters will take broken pieces of little value and form new parts to fake a highly valued object. Scientific tools like chemical and soil tests, carbon dating, and radiography as described in my novel Attribution have made it much more difficult to create fakes. Contemporary Latin American art forgeries abound as auction values increase. Forgers have an additional challenge when living artists can identify their own work. In 1993 Christie’s auction house withdrew a Fernando Botero painting offered at $500,000 because it was discovered to be a fake. It was particularly embarrassing because Christie’s put the fake work on the cover of their sale catalogue and the owner of the real painting protested. Botero confirmed the auction painting was a fake. At that time, the artist received queries about three to four paintings per month; he declared all were fakes! Botero died in 2023 and experts will need to authenticate works without his help. Auction catalogues contain warnings for the buyer to beware. Buyers must have their own experts for authentication, but most works are not available for thorough inspection pre-sale. The big houses do provide authenticity warranties, but the small print includes clauses about accepted attributions and expert opinions. In a world where many experts can’t agree, how can the average collector be certain of what they are buying? In Latin America’s high crime environment, sophisticated crime organizations pump up art auction sale prices to launder money. Little known artists can quickly fetch top dollar bids, sometimes in the millions. The centuries-old tradition of anonymous buyers and sellers facilitates these schemes. European countries have worked hard to implement regulations for dealers to know their buyers and report cash transactions. The U.S. recently instituted similar regulations. With over $60 billion in annual international art sales, it will be difficult to enforce especially because dealers and gallerists are ill-equipped to comply. At an art fair, a collector presented me with a briefcase full of cash to purchase an expensive French painting. U.S. banks require a mountain of paperwork for any cash deposit over $10,000. The collector declined other payment options like a wire transfer from his account to mine or another bank instrument, a tip-off the transaction was shady. I passed on the deal. Bank failures, wild inflation, and governments trying to stabilize their national currency, converting cash into hard assets like gold, jewelry, and art is common among the wealthy in Latin America. I attended a luncheon in Mexico City where a fellow guest admired the golden chandelier. Our host corrected him. The chandelier was pure gold, he laughed, and a crate was ready to ship it wherever the owners needed to flee. Worth approximately $60 million U.S. dollars, it’s not likely any customs officer would guess its value. Free zone warehouses (FTZ) in Europe, Asia and the U.S. have museum-level climate controls and security protections. Used as a strategy to avoid capital gains taxes and duties, art works can be bought, sold, and traded without ever leaving the FTZ. Illicit transactions are converted into multiple legal transactions complete with provenance and appraisal paperwork. These warehouses, said to be the largest unseen museums in the world, contain an estimated 1.2 million artworks. Compare that to the Louvre with 380,000 works for a sense of the scope of the problem. Latin American art crimes share similarities with other regions of the world, but the volume of stolen or forged material, illicit cash and corrupt or non-existent enforcement agencies amplify the attraction as a setting for crime fiction. A news story, perhaps true or not, about Escobar’s men freezing without firewood in a mountain hideout burning piles of cash to stay warm, says it all. *** View the full article

I love ghost stories. It’s not just the surface-level horror of the supernatural that appeals to me, but the deeper themes they can be used to explore. They are, at their heart, always about something returning: lost love, buried griefs and traumas, societal shames, injustices. A ghost—like a good tale—will only linger on for a reason. My debut novel Spitting Gold is also a story about the many things that haunt us. Set in 1860s Paris, it follows two sisters who are con artist spirit mediums, exploiting other people’s belief in spirits for their own gain. But, as my characters soon discover, we can’t always pick and choose which parts of the past will come back to speak to us. In researching Spitting Gold, I’ve become a connoisseur of the ghost story. Here are eight novels that have stuck with me in particular, from classics of the genre to more recent additions that deserve a place on your shelves. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson Brought together by the occult scholar Dr. Montague, a group of strangers meet to investigate the reported supernatural phenomena in the remote Hill House. While they expect the poltergeist activity that greets them, they aren’t so prepared for the menacing sentience of the building itself. Hill House doesn’t want them to leave. And for Eleanor—a lonely young woman who has never felt welcome anywhere—there’s something seductive about this. Shirley Jackson’s iconic paranormal thriller may be the blueprint for the haunted house genre, but the reading experience still feels as fresh and surprising as ever. The prose is exquisitely tense; the setting is perfectly unsettling. Just like Eleanor, you will never want to leave. Dark Matter by Michelle Paver I can’t get enough of the uncanny, barren suspense of a polar horror story, and Dark Matter is the best example of this that I’ve read yet. Just ahead of the outbreak of the Second World War, an Arctic expedition sets out from London for the uninhabited bay of Gruhuken. Working-class wireless operator Jack feels a particular pressure to prove his worth to his new Oxford-educated colleagues—not to mention to impress the handsome Gus. So when someone needs to volunteer to remain behind, solo, through the winter, Jack is the one to raise his hand. But as the polar night closes in, he starts to wonder if he really is alone on Gruhuken, or if someone else walks out there in the dark. Beloved by Toni Morrison Set in 1870s Ohio, Beloved is the story of mother Sethe and daughter Denver, whose home is haunted by the infant girl that Sethe lost in the process of escaping slavery. The family attempt to drive the spirit away, but the horrors of the past can’t be exorcized so easily, and soon a mysterious young woman arrives on their doorstep. She identifies herself only as ‘Beloved’—the single word that Sethe could afford to have inscribed on her dead child’s tombstone. Beloved stands out for me as a ghost story that so successfully unpacks the legacies of grief, trauma and interrupted love, both for the novel’s characters and on a larger societal level, making it a powerful and unforgettable read. Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth If you’re as obsessed with urban legends about cursed film sets and theatrical productions as I am, then Plain Bad Heroines is the book for you. This eerie doorstopper takes place between two connected time periods: in 1902, two students at a New England girls’ boarding school are found dead in the orchard following a freak yellowjacket attack. In the present day, the girls’ lesbian love story and grisly young deaths are being adapted for a Hollywood film, shot on-location where the school still stands. As both narratives unfold, they join into one delicious gothic drama studded with a host of brilliantly complicated female characters. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary treat told through the mingled voices of a graveyard of spirits, on the evening that President Lincoln’s son Willie is laid to rest. The cemetery’s inhabitants have never been able to accept their own deceased states, but as Willie’s soul falls into danger, his new neighbors will have to come to terms with reality if they want to help save him. This book is charmingly weird, massively entertaining and it packs a real emotional punch – I haven’t ever managed to get through it without crying. This is the book to pick up if you want a paranormal tale that’s more life-affirming than horrifying. Cold Earth by Sarah Moss Six archaeologists are excavating the remains of a Norse burial ground in Greenland when they learn that the outside world has been hit by a devastating pandemic. Safe in their isolation but entirely cut off from families and friends, tensions in the group run high, particularly when visions of past violence start to creep into their dreams. Cold Earth’s narrative style takes the form of a collection of letters written—and presumably never sent—by these six characters. The result is the literary equivalent of a found-footage horror in the style of The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity, lending a spine-chilling dramatic irony as the reader makes connections between the subjective accounts that the characters aren’t yet able to see. The Between by Tananarive Due When Hilton’s wife is elected as the only African American judge in 1990s Dade County, Florida, the family become the targets of racist hate mail. At the same time, Hilton is afflicted by new nightmares, some so vivid that it’s hard to tell them apart from waking life. One childhood half-memory recurs in particular: the day he should have drowned. Are these disturbing visions just the product of extreme stress, or is something trying to warn him of impending peril? The Between is an enigmatic, shifting novel with a narrator slowly losing his grip on reality. The horror of this story is its uncertainty as psychic foreboding converges with the very real threat of racially-motivated violence. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters Last on this list is the ghost story that managed to scare me the most—possibly because I made the mistake of reading it late at night in a spooky old English countryside house. This is an atmospheric historical novel set in the crumbling Hundreds Hall, whose resident Ayres family have fallen on hard times in post-war Britain. When the newly-qualified physician Dr. Faraday is called to the hall to examine a patient, he becomes tangled up in the Ayres’ lives, and in the strange occurrences that they attribute to a presence they call ‘the little stranger’. Sarah Waters knows how to craft a perfectly-paced story, and the slow-burn, nerve-wracking tension in this novel of social change is no exception. *** View the full article

Mothers, it’s all your fault. But you knew that, right? Whether you: –Let your little boy wander away in a crowded shopping area, never to be seen again –Let your toddler or tween daughter get taken from your own house –Encouraged your adult daughter to travel abroad and into the arms of dangerous strangers. What were you thinking? Welcome to a specific subgenre of psychological suspense novel, the one that explores parents’ fears—let’s be honest, mothers’ fears—about what might happen to our children. Whether they are stolen from us or go missing in other ways, including metaphorical ones, these novels are about more than just mothers’ inclinations to blame ourselves. They are also about control and losing control, grief, the challenge of accepting unavoidable change, motherly intuition, and whether we can ever truly know anyone—even that beautiful person who was, for a time, the center of our universe. I wasn’t thinking about any of that five years ago, when I read my first Lisa Jewell novel, Then She Was Gone, about a mother grappling with all she’d never know about the presumed death of her missing 15-year-old daughter, Ellie Mack. I was sitting on a rocky island beach at the time, alone with a paperback that was both poignant and disturbing. My daughter was in college, several thousand miles away. I missed her dearly, and that yearning must have allowed Jewell’s quiet, character-rich novel to speak to me in a particular way. That summer day was when I decided in earnest to jump genres, from leisurely paced historical fiction to a more urgent kind of psychological suspense. When I first started drafting The Deepest Lake, set in Guatemala, about a mother named Rose who travels to Lake Atitlan to seek answers in the wake of her daughter’s death, I depicted the mother-daughter relationship as close and conflict-free. In that draft, Rose had trouble piecing together the details of 23-year-old Jules’s final hours. The lake’s depth made it impossible to find and retrieve a body for examination, and people who’d spent time with Jules weren’t talking. But Rose didn’t question her fundamental understanding of her daughter. Revisions brought me to a new and less comfortable place, informed by personal experience. Certainly, I feel close to my own daughter, an energetic world-traveler like Jules. But did I know every cliff she scaled, every person she kissed, every rule she broke? Of course not. Like Rose, I had to admit the difficulty of decoding texts and the impossibility of knowing how to read a young adult’s moods and motivations—especially when that child has been out of sight for many months. As a writer, and as a mother, I had to dig deeper to bring my murkiest anxieties into the novel. It isn’t pleasant to picture one’s child suffering from depression, engaging in risky behaviors, falling under the sway of a despicable person, or simply becoming an independent and less knowable adult. But becoming a suspense writer requires imagining those kinds of possibilities, from real dangers to more common forms of emotional loss. At the same time, I still come back to the idea that a mother’s love is powerful, as is a mother’s intuition. We may not know our children perfectly, but we know when something isn’t right. That knowing impels us—and characters like us—to act. Only a thriller’s final pages will tell us whether that love-fueled action has come too late. But first, I read more books. Here are a handful of emotional page-turners that convinced me the missing-child trope is both powerful and capacious, with room for further writerly exploration and interpretation. All the Dangerous Things, by Stacey Willingham In Stacey Willingham’s All the Dangerous Things, life comes to a halt when Isabelle Drake’s toddler-aged son Mason is taken from his crib in the middle of the night. In the year that follows, our narrator’s marriage implodes and Isabelle becomes an obsessive amateur sleuth, devoting herself to understanding what happened to her baby. Lecturing on the true crime circuit and submitting to interviews by a podcaster—anything to find the truth—only worsen Isabelle’s anxiety and exhaustion. You know how readers often say that a well-described place becomes “a character” in a novel? Here, insomnia itself is a character—a tricky foe familiar to any person who has suffered extreme sleep deprivation. Little Secrets, by Jennifer Hillier The trail has gone even colder in another young-missing-child quest, Little Secrets by Jennifer Hillier. A year and a half after her five-year-old son is grabbed from Pike’s Place Market by a man in a Santa suit, successful salon owner Marin hires a private investigator, whose digging leads not to the child but to other unsavory revelations, starting with the fact that Marin’s husband is having an affair with an art student named Kenzie. Numerous other secrets and twists follow. Unlike many novels of this kind, Hillier packs in surprises without depending on unreliable narration. The storyline jets beyond doubtful grief into red-hot anger, as Hillier’s Marin uses her rage to get to the bottom of things. If you enjoy flawed characters and a dual POV structure that complicates readers’ sympathies, this one’s for you. Good as Gone, by Amy Gentry What’s more disturbing than a missing child? The idea that you might not recognize your own missing child years later, when she returns to you. That’s the high-wire premise behind Amy Gentry’s Good as Gone, in which returned teenager Julie seems curiously unfamiliar to her mother Anna. Structurally, this thriller is complex, with alternating chapters that tell us the mom story alongside the slowly unspooled backstory of a teen on the run, struggling to survive. Far more than just a novel about abduction, Good as Gone considers topics from sexual violence to identity and how we are shaped by experience. Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared In Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared, we arrive at the story of a teen old enough to be a mother herself. Tallulah, 19, has gone on a date, leaving her baby in the care of her mother, Kim. Then Tallulah disappears. Kim has a hard time believing Tallulah would take off without her child, but then again, young adults are unpredictable. Having thoroughly enjoyed my fill of mother-and-child stories in which the very young victim is unquestionably innocent, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to novels like these precisely because the missing teen or young adult plays a more active and ambiguous role. Our grown or nearly-grown children sneak out, take risks, befriend the wrong people. They fail to answer emails and texts. They try on new identities. They make dangerous mistakes. On top of that, everything we think we know about our older children relies on the interpretation of spotty memories. How serious was that crisis she had as a freshman in college? What was that argument we had last summer? A certain tone, a look, a silence—these are the clues which only a parent, not a P.I., can decipher. View the full article

A look at the week’s best new releases in crime fiction, nonfiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Emma Rosenblum, Very Bad Company (Flatiron) “[Rosenblum] is fantastic at showing the subtle corruption of wealth and how those who have it justify both the having and the wanting more. A fun, decadent ride.” –Kirkus Harlan Coben, Think Twice (Grand Central) “Harlan Coben is one of our greatest living thriller writer.” –Bookpage Carmella Lowkis, Spitting Gold (Atria/Emily Bestler) “Lowkis’ twisty debut plays with the conventions of the gothic novel in a tale that pits two ambitious sisters against each other… A deliciously convoluted tale of layered deceptions.” –Kirkus Reviews Ashley Weaver, Locked in Pursuit (Minotaur) “With many well-deployed historical mystery tropes on offer, including a juicy love triangle and a host of elegant gowns, it’s an enjoyable, fast-paced lark. Fans of Susan Elia MacNeal and Rhys Bowen will have fun.” –Publishers Weekly Elka Ray, A Friend Indeed (Blackstone) “Readers who raced through books by Liane Moriarty, Celeste Ng, and Eleanor Barker-White will appreciate Ray’s compelling, well-paced, and plot-driven mystery. With twists and turns until the final pages, A Friend Indeed dives into the complexity of female friendships, shifting loyalties, and the allure of the unknown.” –Booklist Kate Weston, You May Now Kill the Bride (Random House) “I laughed, I gasped, and said ‘I do’ to this chilling romp sparkling with humor, Prosecco, and murder.” –Julia Seales Nicola Solvinic, The Hunter’s Daughter (Berkley) “This atmospheric and haunting mystery will keep the reader guessing to the very last page. A must-read for lovers of serial-killer thrillers and mysteries with a darker edge.” —Booklist Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine (Crown) “Johnson’s vivid, eye-opening history chronicles epic labor-movement battles, terrorist bombings failed and tragic, backlash against immigrants, love affairs, undercover operations, courtroom dramas, and prison life in a fast-paced narrative rich in cinematic moments and resonance.” –Booklist Craig Whitlock, Fat Leonard (Simon and Schuster) “A vigorous investigation into the life of a con artist and swindler who had half the leadership of the U.S. Navy in his pocket….Maddening and astonishing in its revelations of a crime spree that cost taxpayers untold millions.” –Kirkus Reviews View the full article

At 23, I decided I wanted to work with offenders. I’d always been fascinated by people who did bad things, maybe because I was a little bad myself. I’m the second youngest in a gigantic family, so there’s a touch of catholic guilt talking, but no, I was naughty as a child and young adult. I rejected boredom. I confronted bullies, I broke rules. I never did anything really bad, but I believed I might be capable, and was interested in people who did. I wondered: ‘Why did they do that?’ and ‘How can we make sure they don’t do it again?’ I was working as an administrative officer in a hostel in London at 23. I loved it. The staff were friendly, and so were the 50 ex-offenders who lived there. I interviewed some of them, published a small booklet with the stories they told me. One was set in Manchester during the second world war. He was out at the shops when a bomb hit his workplace. The story was called: ‘How cigarettes saved my life.” There were stories everywhere in that hostel; every one of the men had lived difficult, dramatic lives. The hostel in London was a happy place. It was well managed. It was caring. And it wasn’t a halfway house. It was a permanent home to the residents. When I fell in love with a Scots-Italian, I applied for a job as ‘project worker’ in a hostel in Edinburgh, and arrived in the gothic, fairy-tale city on a glorious summer’s day. The interview – and the job – was in a beautiful Georgian townhouse right in the middle of the New Town. I didn’t notice much about the inside of the building. I was too excited about my new life. Somehow, the interview went well. Afterwards, I skipped all the way to Princes Street and up The Mound to the Royal Mile. In the afternoon sun, I lay on the grass in The Meadows. By evening, I was writing bad poems on cobble-stoned streets in old town cafes. I had found myself. Social work was my job. Edinburgh was my city. Writing was my hobby. Three months later, I found myself sitting at a rickety desk in a dingy office, trying to finish the short story I started years earlier. It was dark. It was only 4pm. The inside of the beautiful Georgian townhouse stank of urine, cigarette smoke, sweat, and sperm. I was completely alone, thankfully. The residents were all out getting drunk. They would return, sooner or later, and all hell would break loose. Edinburgh was not the same place that it was in September. And I had no idea how to write a short story. Suddenly, my colleague, let’s call him Jim, walked in with his Christmas shopping and his smile. “Don’t cry”, he said. I didn’t realize I was. “Don’t let them get to you,” said Jim. “They just need us to help them untie their knots.” He was talking about the five residents living in the hostel. All of them had prolific and serious criminal histories. They were considered ‘very high risk’. They had stringent conditions on their parole licenses, like a condition to live in this halfway house for one year, with idiots like me—as well as qualified social workers—watching your every move. Since starting the job, I’d been threatened and manipulated by sex offenders, undermined by the boss, and followed home by a man with a baseball bat. I’d had taken to chain smoking and trembling. This was nothing like the hostel in London. This was more like a prison, and I was the only guard. This terrifying job was the inspiration for my latest book, Halfway House, in which the naive and selfish Lou O’Dowd finds herself living with the five worst men in Scotland. After qualifying as a social worker (specialising in criminal justice), I got a job in the Gorbals Social Work office. The Gorbals was famous at the time – for poverty, deprivation, addiction problems and gangland crime. My family and friends in Australia were so worried for me. They’d read a book about life in The Gorbals during the depression (‘No Mean City’) and they hadn’t heard anything good about the place since. “Where? The Gorbals. No. Not The Gorbals. (When an area in prefaced by ‘The’ in Glasgow, it means you probably shouldn’t go there). Right enough, The Gorbals was ravaged by poverty. Its 70s high-rise buildings were in disrepair, and—to my horror during home visits to the 14th floor—swayed in the wind. But the people were the friendliest I’d ever met in my life. I ended up playing in the Gorbals netball team. (We smoked at half time. We also won.) I left the Gorbals office when ‘something very exciting happened’ with my writing. I’d written a screenplay for fun and it turned out to be okay. I was going to be a screenwriter. I had a glorious going away party. I had a night out that ended with a fabulous amount of remorse. I had a big cake. My boss gave an amazing speech. Obviously, nothing happened with the screenplay. That terrible hope, gets me every time. I returned to the Gorbals office two years later; embarrassed, terrified, and excited. I was glad to be back. And my colleagues were kind. In Glasgow, people much prefer a failure. My next job was in HMP Barlinnie, or ‘the big hoose’ as it’s called here. It’s a Victorian prison with five intimidating stone Halls, all in a row. It’s being replaced right now and will not be missed. The stairs were worn and the two-storey building stank and the cells were tiny. Every day, I felt for the prisoners. It was dehumanizing in jail. After three years, something very exciting happened again. I had written a book. I was going to be a novelist. The Barlinnie Social Work team gave me a small going away party and a small cake. My boss didn’t give a speech. I managed to be a full-time writer for four years before I needed to get back to it again. (Not only money reasons, but also sanity. I like being in a team). I returned to a frantic office in Paisley. My job involved supervising probation and parole cases, writing sentencing and background reports for the court, visiting prisons, doing home visits, undertaking risk assessments with the police. I really got to know the people I was supervising; their families too. And I loved being aware of the types of crimes that were coming into the system, and the harmful behaviours that were not yet illegal. While I was in Paisley, I wrote Viral (about revenge pornography) and The Cry (about coercive control) – and these crimes have since been made illegal in the UK. I would have stayed at Paisley, if something very exciting hadn’t happened with my writing. My novel, The Cry, was being adapted into a BBC/Netflix drama. And so I resigned. I don’t remember getting a cake. That was six years ago, which means that this has been my longest period as a full-time writer to date. And I am getting the itch again. I want to listen to people’s stories. I want to try and support them. I’m sick of thinking about myself. I’m craving my dark and hilarious colleagues. I have, in fact, been thinking about applying for a job as group worker. It’s with men who’ve been convicted of intimate partner violence. It is so tempting. It’s what I’m interested in. I’d say two-thirds of my books are about domestic violence and toxic relationships. The job specification is on my desk. The application is open on my laptop I’ve confirmed with my old boss that she’ll give me a reference. But wouldn’t you know it? My screenwriting agent just emailed… Something very exciting has happened. *** View the full article

If – like me – you love a comedy murder mystery or thriller, but have been judged by someone for it, I’m here to tell you that it’s ok because of science. That’s right, there is actually science behind your enjoyment of silly murders. One of the things that we humans find funny is incongruity (again this is according to science, not me, and I’d like to stress this is almost the only bit of science I know). We recognise two things as being wildly different and that the act of putting them together seems ridiculous. Thus, laughter ensues. Obviously, it’s more complex than this but a) I’m not that smart and b) there’s a word count here. The main thing is that the reason we find it funny is not because we’re bad people, it’s because the two things – comedy and murder – are so wildly different it prompts this response in us. Also, if you’re anything like me you make light of things that you’re afraid of. I am afraid of death; so I laugh in the face of it…on the page. So if you also love a comedy thriller, here are my top five, current favourites. After all, they do say laughter is the best medicine. Just maybe some of the characters are a little beyond the help of said medicine… How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie This darkly funny novel following antihero Grace Bernard as she enacts revenge on her terrible family had me hooked from the description. It’s witty and sarcastic, completely unique, and above all else it left me cackling. Unlikeable female characters get a bad rap but no matter what she does you root for Grace Bernard. I read this book years ago and it remains a favourite to this day. Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Sutanto Protagonist Meddy Chan is set up on a blind date by her meddling aunties. When the date doesn’t exactly go to plan, and she ends up accidentally killing him, her and her aunties set about trying to hide the dead body. This book has everything, unexpected killers, laugh out loud moments and even a bit of romance! I love everything Jesse Sutanto writes and to be honest I struggled to pick only one of her books to include on this list. Bunny by Mona Awad This book has it all, drama, horror, and satire. Set on a University Campus, outsider Samantha Heather Mackey is drawn into a clique of unbearably twee rich girls called the Bunnies. Bunny is twisty, hilarious and terrifying in equal measure. The characters are so well drawn that you can’t help but stay stuck down the rabbit hole until you’ve finished it. How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin Frances was told she’d be murdered by a fortune teller in 1965. For sixty years she tried to stay safe while none of her friends or family believed her. Until one day, when the murderer succeeds. Enter her Great-Niece Annie from London, who finds herself caught up in Frances’s posthumous act of revenge against her sceptical friends and family. With a country estate full of clues to unpick, whoever solves Frances’s murder gets to inherit her millions. Village murder mysteries are my favourite thing, and this one’s engrossing, clever and twisty as well as being packed with humour. A Most Agreeable Murder by Julia Seales An eligible bachelor dropping dead at a ball? Check. A cast of brilliant characters trapped in a mansion with a killer? Check. A hilarious main character who’s trying to put her ‘unladylike’ obsession with true crime behind her? Check. The perfect package for a cosy, funny, mystery in my opinion! A cross between Jane Austen and Knives Out/Glass Onion, this has some incredible one-liners and is utterly ridiculous in the best of ways. An absolute treat of a book. *** View the full article