Unread Content

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Nick Harkaway, Karla’s Choice (Viking) “Karla’s Choice is a note-perfect tribute to le Carré. Nick Harkaway has pulled off the remarkable trick of providing the long-term reader with something which is satisfyingly fresh and new, and yet fits seamlessly into the world of Smiley’s Circus in its heyday.” –Mick Herron Delilah S. Dawson, It Will Only Hurt for a Moment (Del Rey) “Steadily mounting mysteries and disturbing revelations at an art commune in this story about a woman’s liberation from an abusive relationship make this another must-read in Dawson’s growing canon of work.” –Chuck Wendig Sydney Graves, The Arizona Triangle (Harper Paperbacks) “This desert noir features complex characters trapped in an ugly, emotional past. The vivid details and beauty of the Arizona landscape are in sharp contrast to the repellent secrets of a killer.” –Library Journal Richard Chizmar, Memorials (Gallery) “Scary and hard to put down. You might be advised not to read it at night.” –Stephen King Hesse Phillips, Lightborne (Pegasus) “Hesse Phillips’ dazzling Lightborne returns us to a world of more moral certainty but considerably more physical danger, telling the story of Christopher ‘Kit’ Marlowe, the Elizabethan dramatist and spy, with a thrillingly intense sense of period.” –The Financial Times Robert Dugoni, Beyond Reasonable Doubt (Thomas and Mercer) “A cunning master class in why you should always trust your lawyer, and what it’ll cost you if you do.” –Kirkus Reviews Ian Ferguson and Will Ferguson, Mystery in the Title (MIRA) “This small-town cozy combines quirky characters, over-the-top situations, and fading Hollywood glamour in a winning combination.” —Booklist Mark Aldridge, Agatha Christie’s Marple: Expert on Wickedness (HarperCollins) “This quirky, trivia-filled look at a touchstone of detective fiction will have Christie fans young and old in heaven.” –Publishers Weekly Eliot Pattison, Freedom’s Ghost (Counterpoint) “Pattison adeptly portrays the panorama of late–1700s Massachusetts, sprinkling in historical characters (e.g., John Hancock, John Adams), British spies, impressment, and more. Multiple plot threads run simultaneously, maintaining suspense as McCallum tracks a sadistic killer .” –Booklist David List, What Are the Odds (Blackstone) “[List’s] energetic depiction of every episode, full of sharp character portraits and droll details, engages interest and keeps the story moving…An outlandish and entertaining comic thriller.” –Kirkus Reviews View the full article

Readers can be forgiven if they think after reading The Puzzle Box—and its predecessor The Puzzle Master—that Danielle Trussoni is puzzle obsessed. She’s not. What drives her fiction, though, is the same pursuit for understanding how it—meaning life—all fits together. And we’re lucky she’s on that quest, because The Puzzle Box is a wild ride into a high-stakes world of deadly puzzles, ancient secrets and epic sibling rivalry. Nancie Clare You are a memoirist and a novelist; the subjects that you write about center around the search, the odyssey, the quest for secrets, for clues, for solutions and for self. Is that an accurate way of looking at your work before we talk specifically about The Puzzle Box? Danielle Trussoni That’s such an insightful way of looking at my body of work. It’s something that I’ve thought about a lot lately, now that I have seven books that are published. Seeing them all together on the shelf, it’s like “what connects these things?” And this is a roundabout way to say that I started writing because I needed to understand my family. My first book is a memoir about my relationship with my father who was a Vietnam vet. It was all about family secrets and the things that were hidden and who I was and who he was and how trauma and history affected the present. If I look at my novels, are there secrets, history, how they affect the present, uncovering them, and a kind of quest, as you said. And so I think that structures the memoir that I wrote, and it also structures all of my novels. Now, one thing that was really important to me after I wrote that first book was that I didn’t want to write the same book over and over again. I decided after publishing Falling Through the Earth that I was going to write something very, very different, and Angelology was very, very different. But now that you point this out—and when I look at the collection of books that I’ve written and the patterns and archetypes—all of those things were there: historical influences on the present and the quest with a little bit of religious influence because I was raised very Catholic. I went to a Catholic school. In the fifth grade, there was a school shooting where the priest and two other people were murdered. And so that violence, that sort of mixture of religion and violence and growth, became wrapped up in my work. Nancie Clare In your acknowledgements, you give a shout out to Dan Brown, and at one point the central character of both The Puzzle Master and The Puzzle Box, Mike Brink says, “this isn’t a Dan Brown book”, and I agree, they are very much not Dan Brown books. Danielle Trussoni Really not! Nancie Clare At most there’s a similarity to Dan Brown in the quest aspect of the stories: following a trail of clues towards a conclusion, which I guess could be something you could say about all crime fiction. Danielle Trussoni Sure. I thought it was really interesting because when Angelology, my first novel, was published—and that was probably my most widely read book—I would be asked over and over about how Dan Brown influenced me. And at that point, I had never read Dan Brown! There’s all this stuff about angels and demons and the supernatural and various quests and stuff. That was something that really came from, to be quite frank, the Bible, my religious upbringing, and reading lots of 19th century fiction, Wilkie Collins and those kind of detective novels. It’s a little bit of a coincidence that there was any overlap between Angelology and Angels & Demons. I ended up meeting Dan Brown and became a friend of his. I could understand why that comparison was made. But I think while there are similarities in themes and similarities in structure, the tone is so wildly different that the books really can’t be compared. And he’s told me the same thing. We both agree about that. Nancie Clare Puzzles and their solutions—often with high stakes for the person answering the questions—run through mythology. I mean, let’s just talk about Odysseus and The Odyssey and The Iliad, characters are always having to answer questions from the Sphinx or go through a labyrinth—and if they don’t succeed, they’ll die. What is it about these stories: quests with seekers that often have extraordinary skills that is so addictive to humans? Danielle Trussoni I agree, I think there’s something deeply, deeply satisfying about being posed a question, being posed a riddle, and then bringing the reader through it and solving it. And if I even take that one step farther, I think of writing a novel to be that exact setup, right? We have a premise, and we have something that the characters want to know. And the entire novel, through emotional stakes, through relationships, through secrets and through adventures become this wonderful experience of solving it. All fiction has that in common. That’s why I’m drawn to fiction and why I write fiction, and it’s why I’m especially in love with crime fiction and thrillers, because that’s right out on the surface and it’s very clear. And I would just add that that’s what living is, right? We are here without answers. We’re born without any sense of what the larger answer to this existence is. And so being able to condense it and boil it down into a sort of essential question in a novel makes life graspable in some way, in a small way for a couple of hours. That for me is the beauty of fiction in general, not just crime fiction and thrillers, but every kind of reading. I would say that for me, it’s a larger existential question of why I write and why we read. Nancie Clare Let’s talk about your protagonist, Mike Brink, both in the The Puzzle Master, where you introduced him, and the current novel, The Puzzle Box. Mike’s a young man who suffered a traumatic brain injury in high school that led to acquired Savant Syndrome, which is a real thing, rare but real. And in Mike’s case, it manifests as making him a puzzle master extraordinaire. I remember when I read the first book, as appealing as the syndrome might sound—as in like, who wouldn’t want to be a genius—it is a neurodivergent condition and can be devastating for the person who has it. So these two elements—puzzle master and acquired Savant Syndrome—where did they come from and how did they get molded together? Danielle Trussoni In the beginning, Mike Brink was just really smart. I had written a draft of The Puzzle Master, and at one point the character of Jess Price and the cipher that she draws in prison was more prevalent. She was a bigger character than Mike Brink. But when he came into the novel, when I started developing the person who solves that cipher, I realized that this was a huge possibility narratively, to have someone who was something of a genius and could go through the novel and solve it and go deeper into what this mystery was about. I started from a point of not knowing anything about Savant Syndrome or even puzzles. Really, I am not a puzzle expert myself, and I’m not particularly good at them. I like the crossword and I love Wordle, but that’s about it. I started doing a lot of research about genius, and I stumbled across a book by a man named Dr. Treffert who had an institute in Wisconsin where he helped, counseled and worked in various ways with savants. I read about acquired Savant Syndrome, and I was like, this is completely incredible. If the human brain, after having some sort of traumatic brain injury can overcompensate in a way that allows it to do things that it couldn’t do before, what does that say about human consciousness? And it just took me into this whirlwind of questions. And for me, when I hit a point like that with a character, I know that’s a character I want to spend time with. I went back in the novel and revised it and made Brink much more prominent, and I really explored the damage [Savant Syndrome] can do. I think that in The Puzzle Box, it’s even more apparent that Mike is suffering. The idea that, oh, yeah, I would love to be able to have an eidetic memory, and I would like to be able to read a novel in five minutes and remember everything. That seems nice on paper, but the chaos that this character lives with and the need he has for order and stability is really, for me, the most compelling part about that character. Nancie Clare And the compulsion to complete puzzles. Mike acts against his own self-interest; he will put himself in danger to solve a puzzle… Danielle Trussoni Kind of like being a writer! When I started writing, I was very aware that it was not the best career choice, not the most stable, that I may never make a penny doing it. It was just pure addiction and love of the act of writing and of books that brought me into it. Nancie Clare Mike vacillates in how he views his condition: sometimes a gift, sometimes a curse. It makes him ripe for exploitation by people with bad intentions—and not just people, because I want to talk about Jameson Sedge, who manipulated Mike into solving an ancient mystery before Sedge uploaded his consciousness and killed himself at the end of The Puzzle Master. The idea of uploading your consciousness into an external neural network like he did, I don’t even know what the nomenclature would be, makes him a formidable enemy because now Sedge is nowhere in everywhere, and that’s a little like God, Danielle Trussoni Which is the problem with a villain like God. Right? But it’s also the manifestation of one of my biggest fears about technology. I know I am not the only person in the world who’s afraid of what AI can do. Companies have essentially trained their AIs on our books that were pirated without permission and without compensation. And there’s nothing we can really do at this point; it’s very frustrating. And for me, this is my nightmare as a writer—something I love to do and that I’ve dedicated my life to learning how to do well is going to suddenly become irrelevant. I personally don’t think that readers will ever be happy with AI generated books, but still, it’s terrifying. And it’s something that I think about for Jameson Sedge, who’s this sort of godlike and devil figure, he’s the ultimate hero. And for me, my challenge as a writer was how do you limit something, a creature or a person like AI? I don’t know if that makes sense, but there’s nowhere to go with an all-powerful villain. So Jameson does have an arc, and he is going to change in the next book. And even in this book, he is not all powerful… Nancie Clare Jameson no longer has a corporeal presence. He makes that point in at the end of the first book, saying: I have no body, I can’t eat dinner, I can’t drink wine, I can’t be with my girlfriend, but I’m everywhere. Anywhere there’s an electronic surveillance device or a phone, I can be with you. I have to say, that’s my nightmare: being watched and followed. Danielle Trussoni Yeah, me too. It’s terrifying. And we don’t even realize how far it could go, because we rely so heavily on technology. It’s part of every element of our existence. In my imagination, something like Jameson is a really terrifying villain. And having him be the primary force that Mike Brink is up against, makes this a kind of, I don’t want to say epic, but the stakes are very, very high. Nancie Clare This is about… Danielle Trussoni The future. Who can control and destroy all of us? Jameson Sedge is that big. Nancie Clare In The Puzzle Box, Mike Brink is invited to solve a legendary puzzle. Every twelve years since the mid 19th century—in the year of the dragon—an attempt can be made to solve the dragon box puzzle. And the stakes are high because the puzzle box contains deadly booby traps. You’ve really set up this really high stakes, I don’t even want to use the word game, but it is a bit of a game. And where did that come from? How did an Asian tradition filter in? Danielle Trussoni I lived in Japan in my mid-twenties for two and a half years. I was an English language instructor in a high school in rural Japan. I fell in love with Japan quite literally. I learned how to speak Japanese a little bit, and I really immersed myself in the culture. I learned calligraphy. But another element that was really attractive to me then—I am not a Catholic now— was the idea of spirituality without Western religion. I went on Zen retreats, and I did a lot of meditation. I also became fascinated with the history of Japan. After I went back to the United States, I carried that with me—that kind of spirituality stayed with me. It still is with me. It’s very much part of my life. Nancie Clare But it’s not just the puzzle, not just the potential for death in trying to solve this puzzle through booby traps of poison, explosions, losing digits. Mike Brink has adversaries in both the real and virtual worlds. In the virtual world, it’s Jameson Sedge. In the real world, it’s two sisters, Sakura and Ume. Could you talk about them? Because I found them fascinating. I really found that sort of light-dark, ying-yang duality with those two. Danielle Trussoni I love those two. I don’t know if you recall, but Ume has a cameo in The Puzzle Master. She was the one who taught Cam, [Jameson Sedge’s right-hand man] how to fight, and she was Jameson’s head of security. And when I wrote her then I was like, oh, I love this character. I really love her. And when I was writing The Puzzle Box, I knew I wanted her to be a part of it. It all started with Ume; she was the grounding force of that. The idea that she was connected to historical tradition of the Samurai, the onna-bugeisha they’re called, which were female members of Samurai clans. And from that relationship of Ume to her past and her relationship with Sedge came this idea of what would happen if she had a sister who just rejected all of it, who was modern and had her own path in life? I think you’re right when you say that between light and dark. Ume was a character that I loved in The Puzzle Master, and then Sakura became my favorite character in The Puzzle Box. And those two sisters are both very strong in their own ways, and they represent more of more than just light and dark. I think that they represent the idea of a cerebral strength and a physical strength because Ume is very physically powerful and controlled in her body, whereas Sakura is very much in control of her mind. And those two differences are really interesting to me, especially in the world that I created with Mike Brink, where his mind is both this wonderful tool that he can use, but also something that really harms him physically. Nancie Clare You have another female character that I’m intrigued with, and that’s Rachel Appel. She helped Mike with the God puzzle, which is from the Jewish tradition of Kabbala, in The Puzzle Master and she’s back in The Puzzle Box. I find their relationship to be interesting because it’s not romantic, and interesting because Rachel’s a believer in the divine. And Mike strikes me as a non-believer, which doesn’t preclude him from being in touch with the spiritual, of course, but I don’t think he believes in the same way Rachel does. Danielle Trussoni I see Mike and Rachel as empirical and spiritual. Mike puts faith in his brain and his ability to solve things. He’s a graduate of MIT, and his circle of mentors and friends are scientists and statisticians. Rachel, on the other hand, is a scholar and someone who studies the history of religion and religious texts. She very strongly believes that there’s a higher purpose and that things are connected in a spiritual way. Their relationship for me is a kind of Scully-Mulder relationship. It is this nice dichotomy where the two of them genuinely care about each other. And Rachel is a little bit in love with Brink. But she’s also a bit afraid of moving beyond what they have because she sees that Brink might not be able to handle that, and it might not work. I really loved doing the research to create her in The Puzzle Master, because she’s a scholar of biblical texts, and I didn’t know anything about that. So doing the research to understand her and her work was very, very intense. I spoke with a lot of people, I spoke with Kabbala scholars and read many, many books about the things that she would think and say! Nancie Clare Let’s talk a little bit about writers and research and the rabbit holes that they can dive into. You mentioned it earlier when you talked about Mike Brink, where you said you wanted to make him just a really smart dude, and then you started researching. And it is amazing what can happen… Danielle Trussoni Completely! Suddenly your book is something that you had no idea it was going to be. For me there’s a danger that I can get too drawn into the research and too fascinated by certain elements and let it take over. So, it takes some discipline. There were many moments in The Puzzle Box when I could see going off on a different direction, and I didn’t, which is the beauty of writing a thriller, you have a structure that you can go back to, and you’re not going to get pulled into those rabbit holes as deeply. Someone once asked me, “why do you write thrillers?” And I think that that’s why, because that structure and that propulsive movement of the plot really helps me to stay on track, and not just sort of go off on a tangent and find myself with a hundred pages about some ancient riddle that I think is very cool, but other people might not care about. Nancie Clare I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Conundrum, Connie for short, Mike’s dachshund. I got to say, I love when a dog is part of a story, but I have anxiety while I read, because I’m always worried about the dog. Danielle Trussoni I had readers write to me a third of the way through The Puzzle Master and say, if anything happens to the dog, I’m showing up at your house. People are really, really attached to Conundrum. Me too personally. And this is a little bit a fun fact: The Puzzle Master was published last year, and then for my birthday, my husband bought me a dog that is exactly like Conundrum. She’s a rescue. So now there’s a real Conundrum in my life. Nancie Clare The point of the suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader is the tipping point for a thriller. Do you think about that point? How to make sure the reader going to come along on this ride? Danielle Trussoni Totally. I think that I got right up to the edge more in The Puzzle Master with that. And I think that there were some versions of that book where maybe readers would, if I had left it the way it was, would be like: I’m not with you there with all the stuff that happens with the Kabbala and with AI. It took many, many drafts to get to the point where I felt like I was walking that line. This is why I think the research is important, and going down those rabbit holes that hours later, you come up and you’re like, oh my goodness, where am I? It’s having the scaffolding that the research, the historical information and the world building that supports those moments where there’s a kind of flight of fancy that is: whoa, I didn’t see that coming! Having all of that in place allows a writer to do that. And so that’s why I think I take so much care and so much time to do the research. But that said, hopefully, I think The Puzzle Box has fewer moments like that because the premise of the box—and the reason that the box was made—is really what people have to buy into. Nancie Clare I bought it! Is there anything that I missed in our discussion? Is there anything you’d like readers to take away from The Puzzle Box or take away from the story of your characters? What have I missed? Danielle Trussoni I’m thinking about it. I think you covered everything… Nancie Clare That would be a first! Danielle Trussoni One thing that I’m really going for with The Puzzle Box, and that I worked hard to achieve, is that I want readers to feel like they’re on a fun adventure to get lost in. And one of the most gratifying things for me is when a reader writes to me and says, “I’m Googling things, and some of these things are true, and some of these things are not true, and I can’t tell which is which. Did these things happen?” And ability for readers to get lost and to just put aside reality for a while, and the seriousness of life is really enjoyable for me and gratifying. View the full article

“Every town has a haunted house.” This is the thesis statement of my new novel, Killer House Party. And I believe it to be true. Not that every town has a house with ghosts, but that every town has a house that is haunted. A house that is infamous or legendary. It evokes a very human fear of the unknown, an abyss that–if it catches your gaze–you may never look away from. A haunted house is a folktale. Its retelling defines a place. You can find a city/town/neighborhood’s deepest fears in the story of its haunted house. Maybe it’s the betrayal of the safety we expect from a home. Or the suffocation of being pinned down to one place. What is the house keeping out? What is it keeping in? Writing a novel about such a well trod trope means being in conversation with every haunted house you’ve ever come across. A haunted house symbolizes different things to different people. A haunted house is only ever a symbol. These are the houses that haunted me, in fiction and in life. These are the ghosts whispering in the walls of my haunted house book. Haunted House by Jan Pieńkowski Jan Pieńkowski’s Haunted House (1979) was my first scary story, the foundation of what I came to understand as the horror genre. The book itself appeared in my life with no origin. There was no loving inscription on the first page nor eager cousin watching, waiting for my reaction. In my memory, I read it hiding on the side of a couch with black and white Beetlejuice stripes, heart in my throat. The front cover is the front door (or vice versa, the front door is the front cover), making the act of opening the book a kind of breaking and entering. The prose is in second person, the text casting the reader as a doctor who has been invited into a house of horrors. Eyes follow you from behind paintings. Slime drips down the stairs. The house is full of animals, monsters, and an alien crashes through the bathroom wall. And at the end, you cannot leave. There’s no denouement. No “whew, it was all a dream.” The last thing you hear is your patient screaming for you while you’re trapped in the attic with a huge bat and a box from Transylvania being sawed open from the inside. (Here, the pop up aspect of the book becomes auditory, as the saw truly grinds against the heavy paper box). Closing the book, you find the door has been nailed shut, trapping you inside the story forever. Welcome to Dead House (Goosebumps #1) by R.L. Stine Creating this list is sort of like carbon dating myself. One can look at the pop culture markers of my life and probably guess my age within a year. (Feel free to play along at home! Check my wikipedia to see if you’re correct.) Goosebumps books to me were pure junk food. (I say this with all due respect to Mr. Stine as someone who also tries to write fun, scary books best read in one sitting.) Welcome to Dead House (1992) does what all great middle grade novels must and creates a world in which the children are right from the start and the adults are stodgy, stuck in their ways, and wrong. Josh and Amanda’s family have inherited a creepy old house from a relative no one’s ever heard of. It’s old. It’s brick. It’s definitely haunted. Every new person they meet has the same name as someone in the town cemetery. Nothing weird here! Enjoy your free mansion! Dead House doesn’t have the silly sense of humor typical of Goosebumps, making it feel more sinister like Stine’s Fear Street books for older readers. Josh and Amanda’s dog is murdered. The town is full of ghouls in need of a human sacrifice. And, in the end, as the heroes are getting away, they see another family being brought in to take their place and they do nothing to stop it. Horrifying. The Winchester Mystery House Ah, the Winchester Mystery House. Notable to any Northern California resident for its Grim Reaper billboards (now sanitized to be less threatening). Recognizable outside of the 100 mile advertising radius because of a Helen Mirren film about the mansion’s spooky origin. The Winchester House, as a concept, is a great haunted house story. Sarah Winchester married into a family of gun magnates and was so haunted by everyone their company’s products had killed that she built a big ass mazelike mansion (then called Llanada Villa) in San Jose, California to hide from the ghosts. The house had thousands of short stairs, some leading straight into the ceiling. It had over a hundred small rooms. The front half of the house was boarded up, even while the rest was still being constructed. Except. Well. Anyone who has been tricked into taking the tour of the house can tell you that the answer to most things is that Sarah Winchester was a very rich, very infirm little old lady who built her house in a place with a lot of earthquakes. The many tiny stairs were due to her debilitating arthritis. Part of the house was boarded up because of earthquake damage. Using the house to confuse ghosts wanting to take revenge against her family? It wasn’t even the only house she lived in–she also had a houseboat. Haunted houses are always less interesting when they are explicable. The Zodiac Shack What is a haunted house but a place where a Bad Thing happened? In my hometown of Vacaville, California the local Bad Thing was the Zodiac Killer. (Our state mental hospital also housed Charles Manson. David Fincher was obsessed with us for a few years.) Inactive for twenty years before my birth, the Zodiac Killer was known for killing women and couples in isolated areas of Solano County and then sending ciphers to the local newspapers about it. In my childhood, the name would just get thrown around, associated with otherwise innocuous locations. The lake. The park at the top of a hill. The so-called “zodiac shack” was a house and a barn out on a country road. There were stories about how the Zodiac Killer brought victims there or stored their bodies. It was haunted. It was terrifying. It was titillating. It was a local legend with no basis in fact. The shack (and the barn) were remnants of a local well-off family’s farmhouse, abandoned in the early 20th century. There’s no evidence that the Zodiac Killer ever set foot there. I’m no true crime girlie and this is the only haunted place on my list that I’ve never seen or been to. I drove past it once, flying in a friend’s mom’s convertible in the middle of the night. “That’s the Zodiac Shack,” he said. To me, it was just part of the darkness of the landscape. Shirley Jackson Trio: The Haunting of Hill House/The Sundial/We Have Always Lived in the Castle No one writes a haunting quite like Shirley Jackson. Perhaps it’s because no one understands the act of haunting their own house better than an agoraphobic (she says, from experience). The houses in Jackson’s books (Hill House, Halloran House, the Blackwood Family Estate) are all truly haunted by the same thing as every house in the world: a family. The house is the site of all a family’s woes, their secrets and peculiarities, the things they hide from the outside world. The house is the only witness to the horrors a family perpetrates against each other: the poisoning of the sugar bowl, the push down the stairs, the grief of an orphan who does not miss her abusive parent. Within the house’s walls, a family is an organism that imprints itself on every room even after death. Every house keeps impressions of those who lived inside it before. The floor under the carpet. The handprint in the cement. The ghost in the attic. Echoes and reminders. Every house is a haunted house. *** View the full article

The girl, over those days, ate without a fuss. Maybe she was afraid I would tell on her for staining my apron, for getting flour all over the floor. If I served her chicken, she ate the chicken. If I gave her salmon, she ate the salmon. She still took an hour to eat, and chewed each mouthful a hundred times, but her plate would be left sparkling. I also stopped eating for a while when I was a girl. Did I tell you this story? Just for a couple of weeks, which is precisely how long I lasted at the girls’ boarding school in Ancud. My mama’s employers at the big villa had asked her to move in and work as a live‑in maid, and so she’d come to me and—never one to mince her words—said: There’s no one to look after you or cook for you. The boarding school’s close to my work. She dropped me at the entrance to the school one Sunday evening, and that same night I found I could no longer eat. There was nothing wrong with the food—lentils, beans, stews, chickpeas—but a lump in my throat prevented me from swallowing it. The nuns didn’t know what to do with me. I would take one bite of my morning hallulla bread and butter, and nothing for the rest of the day. They refused to call my mama, to involve her in the histrionics of a lazy, disobedient little madam, as the dining monitor put it when she saw my untouched plate. The Mother Superior tried to convince me that I’d soon get used to life there. The other girls weren’t mean, and besides, my mama had to work, put food on the table, earn her living. She couldn’t leave me alone out there on the land. I don’t remember if the girls were mean or not. I haven’t held on to a single face, to a single name. You can forget what you don’t name, we’ve been through that. I do remember a long, long hall and how, looking down from one end of it to the other, the dining monitor seemed very short, like one of us girls. I also remember the high ceilings in the communal dorm, the creak of the dusty stairs, the empty waste ground on the other side of the windows. I wanted to be gone from that place, to go back to the land with my mama. I didn’t plan it, I promise. It was a rainy lunchtime. I remember it well because on rainy days the huge windows in the dining hall would mist up and more than ever I’d feel I was going to be trapped in that place forever; there was nothing beyond it, no streets, no nature. It had all been swallowed up by the fog and the only thing left was the boarding school floating in a misty hellscape. I joined the line in front of the kitchen, was served a plate of charquicán stew and then looked around for the dining monitor. She was eating with the nuns up on a small wooden platform on the other side of the dining hall. I didn’t even think about it. I walked over there, stopped directly in front of her, and threw my food in her face. And with all my might, a strength I didn’t know I had, I threw the empty plate at the back of the Mother Superior’s head. Don’t work yourselves up, please. I told you: we all have a limit. The Mother Superior fell to the floor, smashing her two front teeth. The dining monitor, meanwhile, still covered in potato and squash, grabbed me by the wrist and with her other hand slapped both of my cheeks. For some reason the canings that followed didn’t hurt. It was as if I were no longer inside my own body, as if I’d already left that place. That afternoon my mama came to collect me, and from the school she led me straight back to the land. There doesn’t seem much point in telling you about the silent journey from An‑cud back to our house. She didn’t look at me the whole time, nor once we arrived. That night she cooked potatoes and pork chops, which I demolished. You silly ass, she said, while I sucked the bones. When my plate was clean, she looked at me and dissolved into laughter. At first it was more of a snicker, as if she couldn’t hold it in, as if her mouth had been taken over by that laugh, but it grew louder and louder until she was doubled over. A whole plate of charquicán in her face! she cried, with her head thrown back and her shoulders shaking uncontrollably. I sat there, frozen to the spot. My mama was really in hysterics now: open‑mouthed, her eyes creased, tears running down the sides of her face. The laughter was catching and soon the pair of us could hardly breathe, two belly laughs in the infinite blackness of the open countryside. Eventually she grew tired and we both stopped laughing. Her face went back to normal; the edges of her mouth turned down. She said, very seriously: Everything has consequences, Lita. You must understand that. The next day, she woke me at daybreak and told me she was going back to her job as a live‑in maid. I was thirteen years old, soon to be fourteen, and I stayed there, out on the land, on my own. Or not exactly on my own. I had the pigs, the kodkods, and the neighbor’s blind horse for company. And every morning there I’d be, battling against the wind to get to the bus stop in time for the bus that would take me to school, and with no mother around to tell me: Put your hat on, Lita. What did I knit you that wool hat for? Little rascal, my mama said just before leaving the house. And then, like a premonition: You’re going to have to learn to look after yourself. __________________________________ From Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes. Used with permission of the publisher, Riverhead Books. Copyright © 2024 by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translation copyright © 2024 by Sophie Hughes . View the full article

Quick quiz: What’s the first crime committed in the Bible? And no, it’s not Cain murdering his brother Abel out of jealousy, though that definitely ranks up there. The first crime, I would argue, is when Eve gets blamed for violating God’s instructions—and she gets all the blame, even though Adam is equally—and perhaps even more—guilty than she is. The first Letter to Timothy, written in Paul’s name, repeatedly declares that women should keep silent in his Church, and not preach to the men, “For Adam was created first, and Eve afterwards; moreover, it was not Adam who was deceived; it was the woman who, yielding to deception, fell into sin” (1 Timothy: 2:13-14). Right. Let’s subjugate women for the next 2,000 years based on a highly selective reading of a few sentences in Genesis 1-3. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Eve has been charged with the crime of being inferior due to her status of being “created after” and of bringing sin into the world. And yet Exhibit A, chapter 1 of Genesis, clearly states that man and woman were made at the same time, several verses after the creation of “creeping things.” So if coming later in Creation is a sign of inferiority, what do we do with Genesis 1, which places the creation of humans after that of insects? Exhibit B: OK, so we’re going to ignore Genesis 1 and focus exclusively on Genesis 2-3, which is the better-known version, after all, where Adam is made first, and Eve later (from part of his side), but here’s the rub: If you’re going to privilege this version, Eve does not exist yet when God tells Adam not to eat the fruit from the Tree of Life. Adam hears the prohibition directly from God. Eve apparently hears about it from Adam sometime after the fact, but this conversation is not recorded in the pages of the Bible. What does happen, when Eve decides to eat the fruit, is that her husband is apparently standing right there next to her, not saying a word about how maybe this is a bad idea, since God kind of said not to do it. The problem is that two-thirds of the exculpatory evidence in Eve’s favor is in ancient Hebrew. In modern English, we get the weakest third: “So she took some and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, and he ate it” (Gen. 3:6), which certainly suggests that he’s standing nearby. But there is a Hebrew word in the biblical text, which is pronounced something like imahu (my ancient Hebrew is pretty spotty), meaning “with her.” So a more accurate translation would be, “she also gave some to her husband with her, and he ate it.” Sure sounds like he’s standing right there, doesn’t it? Most persuasive of all is that the serpent is speaking in plural verbs, which no longer exist in English, but the serpent is clearly talking to more than one person, and there’s only one other human on the planet according to the text, and he’s the one who heard the prohibition straight from God’s mouth, so arguably Adam is the bigger sinner. Yet he gets a pass—not from God, who does punish him, but from Western civilization, for want of a better term. Two thousand years of patriarchy follow, and it’s all based on… um, lies and distortions. Surprisingly, the ultra-Orthodox Artscroll Chumash is the only English translation I’ve ever seen that includes the words “with her” in Gen. 3:6. Another crime occurs in the violent and chaotic era of the Judges, when a completely innocent woman suffers from a man’s mistakes is when Jephthah, a warrior, makes a vow before God that if he is victorious against the Ammonites in battle, “then whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return [shall] be offered by me as a burnt offering to the Lord” (Judges 11:31). You know where this is going. Sure enough, when Jephthah returns triumphant, his daughter—his only child—comes out to meet him, making music and dance in celebration, and he laments that she has to die, “For I have uttered a vow to the Lord and I cannot retract” (11:35). Too bad the unnamed daughter is so accepting of her father’s fatal error, agreeing that he can’t go back on his vow, and so she must die. Too bad she doesn’t get to say, “What is this, a Greek myth? Just tell God you meant an animal, not your only begotten child,” since God clearly shows his preference for animal sacrifice over human sacrifice when he sends an angel to stop Abraham from sacrificing his son, Isaac, in Genesis 22. But there you go. The unnamed daughter’s tragic story is there to serve as a general warning to watch what you say when you’re making a vow before God. OK, we’ll remember that. But I want to leave you laughing. Yes, really. So: I once came across a mysterious book in Hebrew, and I brought it to the Hebrew professor at Stony Brook University, who told me it was an anthology of Jewish humor going back to the very beginning. “You’ve got to tell me the first joke,” I said. He turned to the first page and read: “And the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’” Am I my brother’s keeper? If that’s the first joke, that’s a pretty grim sense of humor, there. *** View the full article

The scene is getting hotter by the day. I'm almost a best seller.

You hear this type of thing a lot and it doesn't square with reality.

There are few films as fascinating, for good reasons and bad, than The Postman. Directed by lead star, Kevin Costner, and released in 1997, critics coalesced to name it one of the worst movies of all time. It won several Razzie Awards (given to the “worst” films of the year), and as recently as 2023, Rolling Stone ranked it as one of the “worst decisions in film history” (I often consider reading Rolling Stone one of the worst decisions in journalistic history, but I digress…). While it is ill-advised to insist that The Postman is a great movie, it is not nearly as awful as most critics would contend. It is also significant for presenting one of the most profound cinematic depictions of the political battle between liberal civilization and fascist feudalism. It is a movie that, despite its parcel post-sized flaws, is stunningly applicable to America’s current crisis of democratic endangerment. Adding to the fascination of the film is its wildly contradictory effect on the viewer (or, at least, this viewer). There are moments when the movie feels as if it could become one of the greatest of all time, and then there are scenes that go beyond embarrassment into the terrain of psychological inquiry, namely, “What the hell was Costner – by all accounts and evidence, a highly intelligent man – thinking?” At its genesis, Costner thought that an adaptation of the award-winning David Brin science fiction novel, The Postman, would make for a perfect follow-up to his brilliant directorial debut, Dances With Wolves, which was also an adaptation of an ambitious and epic novel. Actors Tom Hanks and Richard Dreyfuss, respectively, had already tried to secure the rights to turn Brin’s book into a film, but various legal difficulties proved insurmountable. Costner managed to succeed where his colleagues had failed, and enlisted veteran screenwriters, Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Insider) and Brian Hegeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River), to help him craft the cinematic version of Brin’s post-apocalyptic saga. It is easy to understand what potential Hollywood royalty could see in The Postman. Brin explains that his intention was to write a post-apocalyptic novel that, as opposed to stories, like Mad Max and Escape from New York, celebrate civilization, courage, and mutual aid, rather than only displaying humanity at its worst. The novel develops a story with major differences from the film, and I would commit to the minority position that Roth and Hegeland, under Costner’s instruction, made major improvements to the story. What the movie and novel have in common is that they take place in a post-apocalyptic America where nuclear wars, climate catastrophes, and domestic political violence have created a primitive world fit for a neo-Western. People travel by horseback, searching for whatever food, water, and supplies that they can find, and villages form where many inhabitant are, surprisingly, kind and decent, but due to fear and lack of reliable law enforcement, inhospitable to outsiders. Basic services, like an electrical grid, hospitals, and the post office, no longer exist. Throughout most of the novel, there is no well-defined villain or even adversary. References abound to Nathan Holn, a psychotic reactionary, who created a large and oppressive militia that roams the countryside, the Holnists, but the fascist force marauding the former United States as the only form of law and power, receives little play in the literary chronicle. Brin does include subplots that provoke greater bafflement and balking than Costner’s soon-to-be explored excesses. There are lengthy passages with a supercomputer that talks to the heroic characters, advising them on how to resurrect society, and likewise, there are “super soldiers,” who are crucial to the fighting that breaks out in the last third of the novel. Costner, Roth, and Hegeland made the wise choice to excise Brin’s absurdities, and to also better present a contrast between the heroes and villains. They maintained the setting, circumstances, and also the arc of the hero: A drifter who stumbles upon a mail truck with a dead mail carrier, and poses as a mailman, while claiming to represent the “Restored United States,” in order to manipulate villagers into providing him with food and lodging. A classic, “reluctant hero,” story, the Postman begins to believe, not in his own lie, but the principles of civilization and human community after observing how the simple act of delivering a letter inspires immeasurable hope in those who thought a functioning, well-connected society was an irretrievable relic of a lost age. The Postman could have made for an ideal companion piece, and even spiritual sequel, to Dances With Wolves. It has become popular to promote the ignorant misreading of Costner’s Academy Award-winning directorial debut as a “white savior” film. Those who parrot the trendy buzzword miss or ignore that the Native Americans save Costner’s character, and that his western was the first to depict the genocidal slaughter of America’s indigenous people. It was also a beautiful tribute to friendship that demonstrates how open-mindedness is critical to multiracial democracy. As the late Roger Ebert wrote, while giving Dances With Wolves a four star review, in what is, perhaps, the best sentence in the history of popular movie criticism: “A civilized man is a person whose curiosity outweighs his prejudices.” “There is a morality in this movie that follows a fine line,” Costner told an interviewer while promoting The Postman. It is the same morality of Dances With Wolves – the prioritization of compassion over conquest, celebration of diversity, the need for kindness and restraint, and an abiding belief in the monuments of community, such as the arts and systems of solidarity. Both films also explore and condemn, quite daringly for the 1990s, white supremacy. The Postman, although not nearly as good of a movie, goes furthest of the two, presenting, perhaps better than any other film, how American fascism would operate if its agents ever obtained national power. The villainous force of the film is the Holnist army. Its leader, General Bethlehem, is played by Willam Patton. The masterful performance of Patton, who is able to project the menace and vanity of megalomania with hypnotic charisma and terror, would have received much greater acclaim if not for the failures of the film. In an early scene, Costner’s character, not yet a mail carrier, earns his living by traveling from town to town, presenting a one man show of Shakespeare scenes, with some aid from his pet mule, Bill. He takes whatever food and supplies townspeople provide in gratitude for his thespianism. When he is about to eat, following a successful performance, the Holnists ride into town, looking to conscript new members into their army. Costner’s character attempts to sneak into a neighboring forest, but Bethlehem spots him. The unnamed protagonist is exactly what Bethlehem desires – an able-bodied, white man. Before pointing to a fleeing Costner, Bethlehem rejects a young recruit, because he detects hints of “mongoloid” in his facial features. He permits enlistment of a mixed-race man, believing he is white. One of his advisors later tells the soldier, “General Bethlehem doesn’t see it, but I think you have some [n-word] in you.” In the Holnist army, women have no role outside serving and granting sexual favors to men. During his brief stint with the Holnists, Costner’s character observes the methodology and ideology of post-apocalyptic fascism. Before executing a man for “disobeying a direct order” to sit down, Bethlehem explains that the “strong have been sapped by the whimpering propaganda of the weak,” and delineates the eight laws of the Holnists. These include, “mercy is for the weak,” “justice can be dictated,” and “terror will defeat reason.” The 1990s were a launching pad for the violent, far right populist movement in the United States. Due to the liberal presidency of Bill Clinton, most especially the administration’s ban of assault rifles, anti-government militias exploded in popularity. The most chilling and consequential iteration of the militia madness was Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist attack on Oklahoma City. The Republican Party, then as now, refused to condemn the violent rhetoric of militias, even cozying up to them when it suited their political purposes. The Postman makes it clear that General Bethlehem possesses a sharp intellect, the kind of which is rare at militia camps. He even tells Costner’s character, “If a military man wishes to rise above mere thuggery, he must have education in philosophy, history, even the dramatic.” Despite his superiority of intelligence and knowledge to the average anti-government extremist, Bethlehem and his army present an authoritarian, reactionary right that should freeze the blood of any viewer in 2024. Imagine if the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, or Three Percenters – three violent gangs all involved in the planning and execution of the January 6th attack on the US Capitol – became the most powerful governing force in American life. Their politics of racial purity, misogyny, and their tactics of testing the credo, “terror will defeat reason,” would create exactly the form of misery, oppression, and stagnation that define the world of The Postman. Given what American politics has become, The Postman functions as a futuristic facsimile of right wing culture. Bethlehem’s deranged ravings about the “whimpering propaganda of the weak,” and his self-motivational speech about the “greatness of I can” as compared to the destruction of “I can’t,” register like YouTube soundbites from the men’s rights, incel “manosphere” of Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and various chauvinist “influencers” who equate strength with contempt and intimidation of women, LGBTQ Americans, and anyone who doesn’t believe that the future of masculinity is best represented by a heavy duty pickup truck and AR-15. The Holnists agenda to “create a new world” of Anglo-Saxon dominance – the reassertion of white supremacy as sociopolitical order – is the logical endpoint of the electoral and cultural program surrounding the “Great Replacement Theory” – the delusion that Jewish globalists are diluting white power through mass immigration and multiculturalism that alarmingly large amounts of Republicans believe is true. The Holnists even refer to themselves, in a not-so-subtle hint of the movie’s racial politics, as “the Clan.” In the fight against the Holnists for the restoration of democracy, civilization, and the communal values of hospitality and solidarity, the film demonstrates admirable restraint. Scenes of violence are few and far between. Costner, like the author of his source material, had no desire to create the kind of cinematic bloodbath that a lesser actor/director, like Sylvester Stallone or Mel Gibson, would have cultivated. Instead, the film shows how the creation of hope is the most powerful weapon against fascism. If “terror defeats reason,” hope overcomes fear. Even if its origin was a scam, the simple act of delivering mail, and thereby, reestablishing official networks of communication, inculcates in Americans faith in each other, their shared history, and their power to beat back fascism. Eventually, the Postman (the character) has his own army – an eclectic assembly of true believers: women, people of color, elderly hippies who fought in Vietnam, and young men who reject the Holnists in the name of freedom. In its juxtaposition of fascism and democracy, The Postman acts as not only a forensic examination of right wing autocracy, but also a visual, narrative manifesto on behalf of social services and public goods. Culturally and socially, given how the army of heroes coalesces, and politically, considering what they aim to achieve, The Postman is an unapologetic argument for liberalism. With its rejection of violence as a tool of leadership and entertainment, The Postman even has an anti-climatic finale. As the two armies are preparing to battle at opposite sides of a field in Oregon, Costner’s Postman challenges Bethlehem for leadership of the Holnists, citing the Holnist law, “Any member has the right to challenge for leadership of the Clan.” The fight that ensues is easily one of the worst in cinematic history. The two men jump off their horses, colliding in midair, and then roll around on the ground until Bethlehem captures the Postman in a headlock, holding a dagger to his neck. “I think I know what your problem is,” Bethlehem says, while preparing to slit his opponent’s throat, “The reason you can’t fight is you have nothing to fight for. You don’t believe in anything.” The Postman manages to whisper, “I believe in the United States,” gives a headbutt to an unsuspecting Bethlehem, and punches him in the face several times before deciding to spare his life. In its confrontation between the two leaders, the film’s political argument is complete. The United States worthy of celebration and faith is a society that prioritizes the public good, welcomes and protects people of all races and genders, along with the disabled, and governs according to compassion and reason rather than vengeance and brute force. The scene following the fight, and the one that closes the movie, captures exactly why, despite its political intelligence, Costner’s graceful cinematography, and Will Patton’s brilliant performance, critics and audiences considered it a massive blunder. Transporting audience twenty-five years in the future, there is a statue unveiling in Oregon. The Postman’s adult daughter – is standing at a podium speaking into a microphone. Boats are on the water behind her, and businesses surround the park. It is evident that resurrection of the postal service, and the revolt against the Clan, has led to the return of modern, democratic civilization. The statue depicts Costner taking a letter from a young boy. An adult man looks at the statue, in tears, and says, “That was me.” The statue is a reference to a scene earlier in the film when the child misses his opportunity to give a letter to the Postman. Instinct makes Costner turn around. He sees the boy with a dejected look on his face, turning around to return to his house. Costner gives his horse a whip, causing it to gallop full blast toward the boy. He takes the letter out of his hand in what seems like an unnecessarily dangerous and dramatic method of receipt. The fatal flaw of The Postman, other than its bloated, three-hour length, is a combination of ego and mawkishness. If anyone were to play a drinking game involving how many heroic, close up shots exist of Costner throughout the 180 minutes of film, they would likely die of alcohol poisoning. A particularly hilarious case in point is when The Postman and his love interest realize that they are falling for each other. In an otherwise beautifully shot scene at an outside musical performance, with colored string lights hanging overhead, the two characters stare at each other before taking each other in their arms to have a slow dance. The camera shows the woman, actress Olivia Williams, from the side, at a distance. Strands of wavy, dark hair partially obscure her face. Then, it cuts to Costner with an intimately close zoom directly on his face. It is almost the opposite of the controversial “male gaze.” Costner wanted to give the audience an opportunity to gaze at him. Olivia Williams’s character is incidental, a mere prop. Moments like the statue fiasco and the romantic scene where audiences were clearly supposed to fall in love with Costner demonstrate why Chicago film critic, Gene Siskel, ridiculed The Postman as a Costner-ego trip, suggesting that the filmmaker should have named it, “Dances with Myself.” It is unclear if the cloying sentimentality of the movie is entirely Costner’s fault or one of the problems with Eric Roth’s screenwriting (it’s safe to assume that Hegeland is blameless). For example, one of the schmaltziest scenes features Costner riding away from a small town, and a young girl suddenly breaking out into a rendition of “America the Beautiful.” The entire town joins her in song. Perhaps, that was an unfortunate Costner addition to the movie, but it could have easily come from the same writer as Forrest Gump. It is understandable that critics found the mountain of cheese, along with the apex of Costner’s ego, insurmountable when trying to appreciate the film, but also unfortunate. Despite its lamentable excesses, it has moments of beauty, and its political relevance is more profound than ever. The right wing was not nearly as destructive in the 1990s. Viewers looking for a political fable with powerful applicability to November’s high stakes election should, believe it or not, consider revisiting Costner’s mail route, and pondering his wise juxtaposition of multiracial, democratic liberalism with the violence and torture of patriarchal, reactionary fascism. A political slogan that Costner’s character improvises to give hope to townspeople clamoring to ask him questions about the future of their fractured country is, “Stuff’s getting better. Stuff’s getting better every day.” Given the crisis of American life in which an authoritarian movement threatens the future of democracy, a Republican Party undermines the public good, and violent militias enjoy legal protection from elected officials, the ever-improving “stuff” now includes Kevin Costner’s most political statement, The Postman. View the full article

I have always loved stories about witches. As a child, I adored the idea of a feline familiar, but on hindsight I think it was the powerful female protagonists that really did it for me. Nowhere else did I read about women who possessed such autonomy and skill – and yes, magic was a bonus. Many decades on, I love that witches are still trending, and they show no sign of broomsticking into the night anytime soon. Far from a mere trend, ‘witch lit’ speaks to the past and illuminates the long trail of women who have suffered and been silenced by the patriarchy. Witch stories are about rebels and rituals, about community and existing outside the binary. They show us how far we have yet to go in terms of achieving equality as well as ways to fight back and reclaim power. Despite reading widely within this genre, I have a few favourites that I’d like to share. Witches Steeped in Gold by Ciannon Smart Enemies-to-friends but make it witchy: Smart’s fantasy novel depicts two witches from rival orders who are forced to join forces to fight a common enemy. Both Iraya and Jazmyne are plotting revenge, but in this world of secrets and shifting alliances it is far from clear who each of them can trust. Inspired by Jamaican folklore, this is a wickedly-drawn and vivacious fantasy to savour. Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid A fascinating and textured imagination of the origins of one of literature’s most vilified and misunderstood women, Lady Macbeth. Here she is Roscille, the illegitimate daughter of a French lord, married to Macbeth at the tender age of seventeen. An utterly humane and unapologetically feminist novel, its portrayal of an ancient world – and an ancient Scotland – is wholly immersive and gives life and voice to this literary heroine. Weyward by Emilia Hart Hart’s debut weaves together the lives of three brilliant women, spanning across four centuries. Their stories are connected by female resilience and the recurrent nature of oppression, and there is a gorgeous meditation here on the natural world and the connection witches have/had to this. I adored how the novel presents ways that women have historically fought successfully to reclaim their identities and voices from patriarchal systems. The King’s Witches by Kate Foster Foster’s second historical novel tells the story of the North Berwick witch trials, which emerged when King James VI ran into trouble bringing his new queen, Anna, across the ocean from Denmark to Edinburgh. Influenced by Scandinavian courtiers, the King blamed weather magic for the storms that hampered his wife’s voyage. Over a terrifying two-year period he brought hundreds of people – mostly women – to trial on charges of witchcraft. This vividly-imagined novel tells this story through the eyes of three women, including the Queen. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen This witty, spiky novel is a fictionalized account of Katharina Kepler, a widow who was accused of witchcraft in Leonberg, Germany in 1615. She was the mother of royal court astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler, known for the three major laws of planetary motion and how planets orbit the sun. in 1620, Kepler left his post as Imperial Mathematician to assist in his mother’s trial, but it is Katharina who takes centre stage. Richly imaginative, this is a brilliantly-researched retelling. *** –Featured image: Witches’ Sabbath, Francisco Goya, 1798 View the full article

What is literary horror and why do we have to make things complicated, you might ask. Complicated books for complicated folks, I say! It’s a scary book that also, in my opinion, has a philosophical bent, sometimes it’s about racism or misogyny or classism, or it might be a reflection of a time in the author’s life. My new book To The Bone is literary horror that tells the true story of The Starving Time, when, in the winter of 1609-1610, an estimated 75% of the settlers starved at the Jamestown Colony and (gasp) there were instances of cannibalism; some survival, one murder most gruesome. It’s pretty horrifying stuff, all the more so because it really happened. But it’s also a story about oppressive power structures and domestic abuse. I felt compelled to tell the story of a woman who was murdered by her husband because I escaped my own abusive marriage only with the help of my family. What would it be like to be stuck in a tiny house and besieged in a fort, when the food was scarce and your husband looked at you with increasingly hungry eyes? Literary horror scares us because it tells us something true about ourselves or the world we live in. But it also, for me at least, helps me process my trauma. In honor of spooky season here are some of my all-time favorites so we can all sob and be scared together. Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians The Only Good Indians by Stephan Graham Jones deserves top billing on this list. As a reader it enthralled me. As a writer it gave me the kind of despair an artist feels when they behold a true master and know they will never measure up. Jones is well known enough that he needs no introduction, so let me just tell you why I love this book. First, the writing; so good, weird yet gorgeous, realistic but reflective and deep. The book follows four friends, men of the Blackfeet nation, who ten years prior killed an elk, unaware that it was pregnant. Lewis is my favorite narrator, although it switches point of view often and with intention. Lewis’s descent into madness is *chef’s kiss* as he is consumed by guilt and grief for the mother elk and her fetus, and is convinced a woman with the head of an elk is hunting him. The story grapples with what it is to be an indigenous person in America today, and the contradictions inherent to individual identity and tradition. Jones also gives space to the point of view of the elk woman who actually is hunting the four friends and manages, despite the violence and visceral anger of her perspective, to have me rooting for her until it comes to a showdown between the elk woman and Denorah, the teenage daughter of one of the four, and an exceptional final girl. Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder is hilarious and weird and an excellent metaphor for the alienation of identity one feels as a new mother. The mother has no name (see: alienation) and the name Nightbitch emerges when she snaps at her husband because he’s being unhelpful-as-usual while she’s struggling to get her two-year-old to sleep. The husband travels frequently for work which hit me hard as a mother; those middle-of-the-nights when you’re up with a baby who never sleeps and you’re all alone, desperate, angry, feral. The mother finds herself slowly turning into a dog. Is it really happening or is she going crazy? Is being a mother a bit like getting cabin fever, only instead of murdering your family with an ax, you and your two year old play in the street in the dead of night, pretending to be wolves hunting rabbits? It’s only through her surrender to her monstrous feminine (who needs divine feminine?) that she feels at peace with motherhood. Octavia Butler, Kindred Kindred by Octavia Butler is a scifi-esque novel that is on this list because even though it isn’t exactly horror, the premise truly horrified me. It’s 1976 when Dana, a writer and a Black woman, finds herself transported back in time to the antebellum south. This happens again and again, every time her white slave-owning ancestor’s life is in danger. She is stuck in the past for longer and longer, and watches her ancestor grow from a small and innocent child to a man who enslaves other humans and rapes a free Black woman, who is also Dana’s ancestor. Butler said about the writing of Kindred that she “set out to make people feel history,” and it works. When Butler writes through the perspective of a Black woman with modern sensibilities who is stuck in the past, it creates a visceral and horrifying narrative of antebellum south that will give you nightmares. Richard Matheson, I Am Legend I am Legend by Richard Matheson is ostensibly about vampires, but really it’s a grandfather to zombie horror and the last man on earth trope. Robert Neville is a scientist, alone and surrounded by the infected, vampire-like creatures which Neville hunts in the daytime, killing them in their beds and sometimes experimenting on them to “find a cure” or maybe just out of curiosity. Eventually he encounters a woman, Ruth, and (of course) they fall in love. But, alas, it turns out Ruth is a vampire and Neville is a bigot. The infected have formed a society and Neville, finally captured, is to be executed for his heinous crimes. As he faces the crowds, he reflects that he has become a legend, a horror story that the vampires will pass on to their children, like what vampires once were to humans. I love this book because it flips your expectation on its head, forcing you to consider what makes a monster, and if, under the right circumstances, you would be the horror story. Stephen King, The Shining The Shining by Stephen King seems like an obvious choice, maybe too obvious, but hear me out. As with the other options on this list, the reason to love this book is because it comes from a place of deep reflection by the author. Unlike the movie (which Stephan King famously dislikes) Jack Torrance is not always struggling to suppress his crazy, à la Jack Nicholson. He’s a recovered alcoholic who deeply loves his child and feels serious guilt for the abusiveness that came out during his worst drinking days. King wrote the book during his own struggles with alcohol abuse and weaves into it a thread of despair, detailing how much Torrance loves his son and how terrified he is of hurting him again. It truly is the supernatural elements of The Overlook Hotel that turns Torrance into a psycho who torments his family. It’s possible even in this day and age that you don’t know the story, so I won’t spoil the ending. But don’t just watch the movie, read the book for the painful and beautiful reflection on parenting and substance abuse that comes along with the terrifying ghosts. Tiffany D. Jackson, Monday’s Not Coming Monday’s Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson is the only Young Adult novel that makes this list, and it’s a doozy. In the form of a psychological horror Jackson gives us Claudia, a Black teen girl living in Baltimore who loves to dance and is missing her best friend, Monday. When Monday’s disappearance becomes so prolonged that Claudia is concerned, nobody seems to care that she’s missing. The mystery of what happened to Monday and how Claudia processes it is fascinating but the real horror is how our institutions fail Black woman and girls, especially when they’re vulnerable. Mary Dowling Hahn, Wait Till Helen Comes Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Dowling Hahn terrified me as a kid. I vividly remember a solid six months in which my sister and me couldn’t go to the bathroom alone because we were so freaked out by this book. I read it again as an adult because of course I wanted to see if it was still terrifying and yes, dear reader, it held up. Helen is a ghost who seems like great fun when she befriends seven-year-old chaos monster Heather, but her older stepsister Molly knows better and ya know, shenanigans ensue. What stayed with me until adulthood was not just fear of death which seems pretty basic, but the fear of your own body. Molly reflects late in the story; “I ran out of the graveyard, anxious to get away from the bones buried under my feet, but knowing I couldn’t get away from the bones under my skin. No matter how fast I ran, they would always be there.” Oof, chilling. *** View the full article

I’ll never forget my Sunday school teacher telling us that little girls are born into more sin than little boys. I was probably seven or eight. I raised my hand and asked if it was true, and the teacher nodded slowly and sadly, citing Eve, and the Fall. Eve was both Adam’s prize and his ruin, and we needed to remember. Her eyes raked over all of us, but lingered on the girls. I worked on American Rapture–a horror novel about a good Catholic girl named Sophie navigating her own burgeoning sexuality at the same time as America explodes with a violent sexually-propagating viral epidemic–for a decade. I knew it was a story I wanted to tell of the impossibility of growing up between these contradictions, of being someone who wants to ask that dangerous why, who can’t accept the stories we’re handed down, but is affected by them deeply. The book is obviously set against a much more extreme backdrop than our own. But not in all ways. Much like Sophie’s own internal battle between what she was taught and what she believes, I’m in my thirties, and I still struggle with the guilt and shame taught to us in church. This is America, so we’re all familiar with the daily double-billboard assault of a LUST DRAGS YOU DOWN TO HELL over the top of a XXX STORE THIS EXIT. Hooters, Viagra ads, Ashley Madison, cellulite removal, surgical med spas. Books banned in schools with the slightest mention of sex or sexual orientation in them. Without fail, someone on tv, or in our lives is discussing acts of sexual violence and implying or even outright saying, Maybe she was dressing too provocatively. Maybe she had it coming. Our country founded by puritans and now fueled by beauty and sex-obsessed capitalism. This impossible tension that fills everything. We tell young girls that their entire value lies in their bodies and ability to attract a partner and procreate, and we also tell them it’s their greatest sin and shame. My first novel, Maeve Fly (a bit of a wild silly romp with a little sex in it), has been in the world for over a year now. I was out one night, and a friend’s date asked me three times which of the sex scenes in my book were written from personal experience. I’ve received DM’s with insane images (use your imaginations—or don’t) and insinuations of disturbing or mundane sexual acts performed on me in response to the book. And none of this makes me special. None of it is anything compared to what women deal with every day. But the Catholic girl part of me always says in a little voice, But you did talk about sex. Maybe you did bring this on yourself. Maybe you did have it coming. In Stephen King’s beloved Carrie—a book primarily centered on sexual shame and repression—Carrie is effectively locked down at home and held in an ignorance that leaves her vastly unprepared for the world and thus wildly vulnerable to it. A young woman coming into her true power around the same time as her body takes on its mature form, and yet still fully at the mercy of those who tell her that same body and power should only be a source of shame. (Will we ever forget the phrase dirty pillows)? I don’t know what younger generations call each other now, but there was no greater insult when I was young than slut or whore. And at the same time, if we weren’t thought of as the most beautiful, the most appealing, that led to its own despair, its own deep shame that we weren’t desirable enough to be insulted. Always this tension, always this impossibility of existing between desire and purity. The idea that desire is inherently impure. I sat down here to write an essay on religion and repression in horror. I wanted to talk about religious horror films and books and how women’s roles in them are largely relegated to possession by demons, or as mother vessels to demons or saviors, or as cast-outs or examples for not primarily acting as vessels. I planned to touch on the beauty and ritual of a gothic church, the nostalgic comfort or fear that incense and organ music incite in us. There’s so much to say, and so many sides to all of it, and I don’t have enough space allotted here to get even a fraction of my thoughts out. But as I’m writing this (during banned books week, and in a time in which our bodily autonomy is a political talking point), and as I’m considering all the ways that we as a society fail young people—all types of folks, certainly not just young girls—, I’m thinking that maybe it’s less about repression in horror, and more about repression as horror. A profoundly important and terrifying truth we put in our books because we are grappling with it, still. All the time. The idea that a woman dressed up on a night out with her friends, or a woman who writes novels with sex in them, or a young girl just trying to understand her changing body could be seen as asking for unsolicited advances or even violence, could be seen as flaunting something shameful and encouraging an action in response. We build sex up to be something unobtainable or that we’re entitled to or that’s sinful and shameful but also a prize. We fan every flame of desire and want and curiosity, and simultaneously instill a belief that it is dark and base and that there is something wrong with us for wanting it. This most natural of things. In American Rapture, my protagonist Sophie is as equally unprepared for the world as Carrie, equally sheltered and instilled with shame and a guilt so heavy she will carry it forever, and she stands at the same turning point moment in life. But the antagonists are raised in the same world that Sophie is. The boys who feel they’re entitled to something from her because they too have formed their selves and identities in this hypersexual and simultaneously ultra-repressed tumult, because they too have been taught on some level that the supreme vocation of a woman is to act as a vessel for something else. When I ask myself why I wrote American Rapture, why I read religious horror or watch it on the screen, when I really stop and think, what do I wish more than anything I had known when I was a young girl trying to step into herself? It’s this: Repression—religious or otherwise—is the horror. Ignorance is what we should fear. What makes us all ill-equipped for moving through life as humans in natural human bodies. And maybe little girls aren’t born into more sin than little boys. Maybe sin is just an idea we’ve created for control. A powerful little beast that preys on all of us every day, in and outside of fiction. And maybe it’s one we just don’t need to feed anymore. *** View the full article

Beach reads—we usually associate them with the summer. A steamy romance, a cozy seaside mystery, a horror story of beach parties and blood. Those are a great time, but right now in the northern hemisphere, summer is waning. Depending on where you are in the world, it might already be dead in more ways than a date on the calendar, with the trees losing their green, the sun feeling fainter in the sky, and a stiff breeze chilling your skin, and it may or may not be tinged with pumpkin spice. But even as the season dims and cools, the beach lingers right where you left it. Maybe you don’t feel up for visiting in the cold weather. In fact, it might not even want you there. I have a soft spot for the beach outside the thrills of summertime. There’s something exquisitely morbid, even gothic, about gray skies over dark blue waves, and I’m enthralled by uneasy stories that capture this feeling, even when set in the summertime, as if the season is only a mask the beach wears before returning to its true grim nature. I’m so in love with that atmosphere, I’ve written it into multiple stories, including my upcoming modern coastal gothic All the Hearts You Eat, and I devour them when I find them. Here are a few books that will coil you in that delicious dismal atmosphere and never let go. They Drown Our Daughters by Katrina Monroe What better way to begin than with a book taking place at a haunted locale by the name of Cape Disappointment? We arrive outside the tourist season, where Meredith Strand has left her wife, taking their daughter back to her family’s home to stay with Meredith’s ailing mother. But family can be a curse, and as we discover early on (helped by a handy family tree!), Meredith’s family has endured a fate of being hunted by the sea for generations. If she isn’t careful, her daughter might be next. From the desolate lighthouse to the troublesome water to the secrets waiting in the depths, there’s a doomed nature to Cape Disappointment’s dread, but each clue into the past makes you eager to endure the next wave. Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth I almost started the list with this one, but I realized how difficult a book Plain Bad Heroines can be to describe on a plot level, let alone characters, and didn’t want vague-talk out the gate. It’s the story of a tragic love between two students at a school for girls overlooking a dreary coast, and it’s the story of Audrey, Harper, and Merritt, and the events surrounding a movie being made about those two students, and it’s also a story about all the forbidden loves the school has seen over time. The coiling sapphic narratives both nourish and consume each other. It’s never dizzying, instead consistently immersive. Brookhants School for Girls is a primary character here, if not the main one, and its heavy personality makes the finding and losing of love to its horrific secrets all the more entrancing. “Inventory” by Carmen Maria Machado This one isn’t a book, but you’ll have to bear with me on that, partly because it’s my list, partly because you should be reading Her Body and Other Parties anyway, and partly because the atmosphere in this story is the perfect somber pitch. It tells of the end of the world, in which a lethal disease passes from person to person by touch, told through the lens of a woman cataloging the people she’s had sex with over the course of her life. The disease spreading by touch is key to this beautiful story’s focus on the people we meet, and the ones we lose, whether it be to time, illness, or a need to move on. Part of that migration brings our protagonist to the seaside, where for a while it seems she might be free of the apocalypse. But connection is wired into our species. Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling I’m realizing now that setting as character can’t help being a defining quality when you’re looking at atmosphere—Yellow Jessamine fits the bill, too, both with the port city of Delphinium and the soon-to-be-overgrown manor of Evelyn Perdanu, filled with secrets, science, and the pall of death. Decay rules this world, a unifying factor of land, sea, and people, and no amount of loyalty from Evelyn’s attendant Violetta or betrayal from other merchants and nobles can deter what’s to come. This is a brisk, engrossing novella by the sea, and for me, Starling at her gothic best. Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward Like Plain Bad Heroines, this is another where it’s hard to describe the plot and characters due to the twining narratives, not only across time and perspective, but into what we know and don’t know is happening at Whistler Bay. Though this book begins one summer and captures a level of Stephen King charm in its early coming-of-age narrative, don’t let the sunshine fool you. There’s a chill to Whistler Bay, between hints of a vicious presence lurking the coast and the way death looms over the young characters. The memoir approach gives the entire setting a sense of constant loss, its brilliance slipping through your fingers as you read it. The book only gets more brazen, taking wild turns through time, perspective, and reality, but all the while, the wind keeps howling through the stones along the beach. Red Skies in the Morning by Nadia Bulkin Bulkin’s debut novella is maximally dour, telling of a world plagued by paracontagions that infect you via video, giving you seven haunted, nightmare-touched days to show the same video to someone else before the invading specter destroys you on its way out. To make matters worse, an unknown murderer dubbed Video Man has taken to purposely infecting people. Think The Ring, spreading and spreading, and with a serial killer on top. Set in a coastal city and following two sisters, the younger mostly raised by the elder, Red Skies in the Morning is a fascinating look at inevitability and tragedy while also creative and heartrending. This book has a limited release and may be tough to find at the time of this writing, but it deserves a wide release. Without spoiling anything, the final scene looking out on the water is both magnetic and utterly excruciating. *** View the full article

When he was young, bestselling thriller author J.D. Barker never thought he could make a living as a writer, so he instead studied business while unaware of his special gift. It would create barriers in his life and career that he would struggle to surmount. Yet it would help him soar to a resounding success. It wasn’t an easy journey and it’s not over. It never will be. But Barker has become rich and famous in large part thanks to his uncommon capability. While in college at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, he worked part-time for BMG Music babysitting and chauffeuring musicians on promotional tours to southern Florida radio stations and publicity events. He spent days with the likes of Madonna, Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, Tiffany, Poison, Skid Row, New Kids on the Block, and Debbie Gibson. “If I got Guns N’ Roses in and out of south Florida for three or four days without anyone getting hurt, that was a win,” he says. It was also a learning experience. He escorted his share of one-hit-wonders and watched them quickly blow through their bulging bank rolls. “I would see their expensive car disappear, then the house disappear, then the apartment, and finally they’d disappear…It stuck with me for a long time…That was a crash course in money management.” Paul Gallotta, reporter and later senior editor at Circus magazine, read one of Barker’s college writing assignments and offered him a job with lifestyle magazine 25th Parallel. For a while Barker worked out of the same newsroom as Brian Warner, who would later merge the names of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson to become rocker Marilyn Manson. Barker also freelanced for several publications including Seventeen and TeenBeat. At age twenty, he syndicated a column on supernatural occurrences and haunted places – an early sign of his literary interest and the publishing business acumen he would later develop. After Barker earned his business degree and observed the chaotic financial world of the music business from the front-row, he found a steady job as a compliance officer at a Florida brokerage firm. His role was to assure stockbrokers behaved ethically with their clients and followed the rules and regs of the business. It didn’t make him the most popular guy at the office, but his bosses were impressed with his drive and productivity. But Barker began to irritate his colleagues and even got into a shouting match with his boss, who should have fired him for the altercation, Barker says. But to his credit, his boss sent him to a therapist to deal with anger management. Barker didn’t know it at the time, but part of the therapist’s practice included working with Autistic children. About twenty minutes into their first session, she recognized his lack of eye contact and general demeanor as traits of Autism. He was twenty-two and had no idea. “Back in school you were just the weird guy in the corner,” he says. After months of testing, he was diagnosed with Aspergers’ syndrome, which is on the Autism neuro-divergent spectrum. He then spent years in therapy learning how to deal with it and to improve his interactions with other people. He began to understand why he liked to be alone and didn’t like to be touched. Why he could read at age three. He learned why others’ jokes didn’t make him laugh. But best of all, he learned why and how he was different and how to embrace it and find normalcy. Today he still wonders what would have happened to him had he not visited the therapist that day. She changed his life. “Outside of seeing the movie ‘Rain Man,’” he says, “I’d never researched it.” What he didn’t realize at the time, but came to appreciate later, was his Autism would become what his wife Dayna later termed his “superpower.” Autism would give him a leg up on other writers and enable him to create an extraordinarily successful career as an author in barely a decade. “It allows me to do what I do,” he says. After twenty years he hated his brokerage job and wanted to write fulltime, but he was boxed in. The brokerage business afforded Dayna and him a big house, a boat and all the trappings of the good life in southern Florida. To feed his desire to write, he’d become a ghostwriter and book doctor. “That’s what made me a good writer,” he says. But it also stemmed from his childhood. “I’ve always wanted to write,” he says. “I grew up without a TV in the house. My mother took us to the library all the time.” During his tenure at the brokerage firm, six of his ghostwritten books became New York Times bestsellers, however none of them had his name on the cover. Watching others receive accolades from his words on the page was starting to get old. After nearly two decades and having recently turned forty, he’d had enough. He and Dayna decided to downsize and give his writing ambitions a go. His brokerage firm felt his loss immediately. They hired three people to replace him. “I’m very good with structure and being organized,” Barker says. The couple sold everything and bought a duplex in Pittsburgh near her family. They lived in one half and rented out the other to cover living expenses. Investment banking, he says, “paid really well, but I think I got a little complacent. I could have started this back in my twenties…But it all came together.” To begin his new career, “I knew I wanted to write a book about a witch.” His first novel, which he called Forsaken, would meld the stories of a historical character with a modern-day witch. Barker, a great admirer of Stephen King, wanted to use King’s recurring character, Leland Gaunt, in his own novel, but he needed King’s permission. He knew King wintered on an island near Sarasota along the Florida Gulf Coast. But not knowing the world-famous novelist, Barker thought it best if he tried to visit him and seek his permission in person. He drove to Sarasota and to Casey Island. After crossing a narrow bridge, he turned onto King’s long driveway, ignoring the “No Trespassing” signs along the way. Finally, he came to a gate across the road making it clear strangers were not welcome. Barker thought better of it and turned around, never reaching his destination. Instead, he called a friend who knew King and told him of his effort. “It’s a good thing you turned around,” his friend said. “King hates that.” The friend eventually got through to King who granted Barker permission to use his character. Barker finished his manuscript in nine months and then faced the next obstacle, finding an agent. He sent out a pile of query letters and sat back to await replies. None came. None, like not even one rejection. He was so naïve about the process, he said, “I had no idea what I’d done wrong.” What he’d gotten wrong was a whopper. Barker mailed each agent a form letter beginning with “To Whom It May Concern.” He soon realized the only person concerned was himself. Yet, in the end his error actually worked in his favor. Not finding interest in Forsaken, he decided to self-publish. He didn’t want to look like he was self-published, so he created his own imprint, Hampton Creek Press. “I put Forsaken on every website I could, including Smashwords.” Because he didn’t know any better, he’d failed to send advance reader copies to reviewers ahead of publication. “This was a big learning curve for me,” he says. The reviews he finally received were positive, but not plentiful. “Ultimately, I didn’t get as many reviews as I would have.” Still, book sales were not bad, but they wouldn’t make him rich. It was no breakout novel, so after several months he hired a publicist. During their conversation, he mentioned his effort to reach out to King. She told him that was the publicity angle she needed. She contacted Publisher’s Weekly, and they soon ran a feature describing his somewhat comical but earnest failed attempt and his ultimate success. Thanks to that article, sales took off, and Forsaken went on to sell more than 250,000 copies. Today, his life is much different. He’s learned the ropes of the publishing business. He writes in the morning and later in the day tends to marketing and business issues. “Ultimately,” he says, “this is a business.” Spoken like a man who knows. He has created his own imprint and now distributes his books though Simon & Schuster. He has cowritten books with James Patterson and created a hybrid publishing empire. He built his own business because he didn’t like the low royalties publishers paid, especially after experiencing the fat share of gross sales he received being self-published. And his key to success? “Being autistic, I’m sure, is part of it.” He’s known for his complex plots and attention to detail in his stories, yet there are no signs of sticky notes or white board scribbles anywhere in his office attempting to piece together plot ideas. Yes, you’ll find bookcases crammed with books, but his desk looks as clean as any corporate CEO’s––bare except for a single laptop computer. So where does he keep his files on his next book? “It’s all up here,” he says, pointing to his head. His superpower. Indeed. ___________________________________ Forsaken ___________________________________ Start to Finish: 11 months I want to be a writer: I’ve known my whole life. Decided to write a novel: 42 years old Experience: Compliance officer for Nobel Financial Group, journalist, ghostwriter, book doctor. Agents Contacted: A lot. Agent Rejections: Technically zero, because no one responded. First Novel Agent: None First Novel Editor: Self First Novel Publisher: Self Inspiration: The books themselves. Website: JDBarker.com Advice to Writers: Write every day. It’s like going to the gym. It’s like working a muscle. If I don’t write every day, it’s a struggle to come back to where I was before. Your voice stays consistent if you write every day. Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, D.P. Lyle, James Patterson, Jeneva Rose, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Patricia Cornwell, Lisa Gardner, Mary Kubica, Hank Phillippi Ryan, I.S. Berry, Heather Graham, and John Gilstrap. View the full article

Hello chaps! It’s high time we put out another quiz. Why? Because they’re fun, I don’t know. Like the quizes that came before it, this one is part quiz, part trivia. Under “questions” I have listed many famous opening lines from crime, mystery, and thriller novels. And you have to guess which book each line comes from. I call these “classic” books. They aren’t all necessarily old, but they are definitely some of the better-known, well-respected books in their genre. The answer key is way down at the bottom. As you take the quiz, I’d write down your answers next to the corresponding questions’ numbers (on a sheet of paper or in your notes app) and then grade yourself in one swoop when you’re done, so that you’re not constantly scrolling down and up again as you go, thereby risking seeing some of the other answers. If you can get the author/character but can’t get the name of the exact book, then give yourself half a point. Obviously, people, this list contains spoilers. I mean, come on! Here we go! __________________________________ Questions: 1. “But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.” 2. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” 3. “‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.” 4. “‘I wish you all a long and happy life.’” 5. “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” 6. “Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.” 7. “I think this is the best we can hope for right now.” 8. “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?” 9. “But that is the story for another time.” 10. “I wish you all good luck.” 11. “In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” 12. “And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.” 13. “I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.” 14. “Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I’ll sure as hell never go back to Texas again.” 15. “That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.” 16. “He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.” 17. “I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.” __________________________________ . . . . . . . Answers down below. . . . . . . . Keep scrolling! . . . . . . . Answer Key: 1. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange 2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 3. Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” 4. Alice Sebold, The Lucky Bones 5. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick 6. Graham Greene, The Quiet American 7. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl 8. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep 9. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles 10. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 11. Cormac McCarthy, The Road 12. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca 13. Donna Tartt, The Secret History 14. James Crumley, The Final Country 15. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866; trans. Constance Garnett) 16. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian 17. Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye View the full article

The writers’ arsenal may come similarly equipped for most authors, but Jenny Milchman has a secret weapon that can’t be equalized: Joy. It’s the thing that sustained her through eleven years and seven unpublished manuscripts before Cover of Snow debuted in 2013. That book won the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. It also introduced readers to what would become the hallmarks of Milchman’s fictional landscape: character driven suspense featuring (perhaps unknowingly) strong female protagonists who are made to confront the internal and external threats that afflict them, all set against the backdrop of a fictional town in the Adirondack mountains named Wedeskyull. It may come as no surprise, then, that Milchman’s sixth novel, The Usual Silence (Thomas & Mercer: October 1, 2024)—the first in a series, connected by community and character—takes those elements and spins them into familiar yet fertile new territory. Psychologist Arles Shepherd, traumatized by the secrets of her own shadowy past, has devoted her professional life to helping troubled children (even as her personal life is in a state of crisis)—a mission she intends to continue with the opening her own treatment center in the wilds of upstate New York. It’s here that Arles manufactures the opportunity to treat twelve-year-old Geary Monroe, whose harried (and unsuspecting) mother, Louise, has dominated her thoughts for a quarter century, ever since Arles encountered her picture as a child. Little does she know that their reunion will come to intertwine with a current missing persons case in which a young girl’s desperate father has enlisted the help of two true crime podcasters to do what the police cannot: find his daughter and bring her home. Drawing on the author’s own background—Jenny Milchman holds a degree in clinical psychology and spent a decade in practice—The Usual Silence introduces a dynamic heroine who may yet find her own joy if she can first learn to make peace with the lingering remnants of her haunted history. John B. Valeri: The Usual Silence is your first true series book (whereas your earlier books shared a common place but with singular protagonists). What was the conceptualization process like for developing a character and circumstances that would carry over – and how did that impact your approach to writing the story itself? Jenny Milchman: I had no idea, I mean really no clue, how much I would love writing a series. You’re right, my first five novels share the same setting, the fictional Adirondack town of Wedeskyull, and The Usual Silence takes place there too. Arles Shepherd is a local who’s grown up in Wedeskyull and after graduate school—she’s a psychologist—comes back to live. The way Arles came into existence is one of those stories writers dream of, and if we’re very lucky, get to have every once in a while. My new publisher at Thomas and Mercer reached out to my agent and invited me to breakfast. Naturally, I was so excited I could barely eat, though the publisher graciously plied me with pastries. She also asked if I’d ever thought about writing a series, especially one that might take into account my first career as a psychotherapist, which the publisher said readers are fascinated by, but don’t get to see as frequently in fiction as, say, police and legal procedurals (a subgenre I love—Tana French! Robert Dugoni!) With that suggestion, the idea of a psychological procedural, and Arles Shepherd, were both born. As I wrote The Usual Silence, I felt Arles’s world unfolding in ways that will take many books—should I be so lucky—to flesh out. For instance, at thirty-seven years of age, she’s never had a love interest before, but she meets someone she holds at arm’s length in this first book. She also has a vicious stepfather who needs dealing with, but that doesn’t happen until the second novel, due out next September. JBV: Arles Shepherd epitomizes the notion of the “complex character,” complete with a mysterious past and self-sabotaging tendencies. How did you endeavor to balance her darker qualities with more relatable or sympathetic ones? Also, what degree of her backstory did you need to know before committing her character to paper? JM: You’re the second person to talk about Arles’s less “likeable” character traits, and given how depthful your literary analysis always is, I now know this to be a thing! But it’s funny because in writing Arles, I didn’t see those dark qualities in the same way. She does have a mysterious past, which severely damaged her, giving rise to self-sabotage and dissociation and things that threaten to derail her life. In many ways, her life already is derailed—at thirty-seven years of age, she meets her very first love interest in this book. The Usual Silence is about trauma and the long shadow it casts. The less lovely traits and behaviors and thought processes trauma gives rise to. A trauma survivor never fully gets out of that shadow. But if the trauma is faced and dealt with, which is what Arles helps other people do, and tries to varying degrees of success to do for herself, there can also be days spent in the sun. And trauma survivors are tough! They know how to fight, for themselves and sometimes others. I admire Arles so much because she will literally kill if someone needs her to. In terms of how much I knew before I began writing—almost nothing. Arles sat down in that chair in her office in chapter one, and then revealed what she’d been through. JBV: Arles is a psychologist who treats troubled children with traumatized pasts. You hold a degree in clinical psychology and spent a decade in practice at a community health center and your mother holds a PhD in the subject. Please talk about your approach to drawing on your own knowledge and the expert insights of others to achieve an authentic and sensitive portrayal of the work (and the resultant ethical and moral dilemmas that sometimes result). JM: So, here’s how that happened. The whole family business thing. When I was in my second year of college, my parents asked me if I had any thoughts about my major and future career possibilities and life after graduation. How I was going to earn a living, you might say. This was a fine thing to ask because I had a plan, a great plan. I was going to major in literature and become a poet and live in the woods in a cabin. I might’ve planned to build the cabin myself—is that how Thoreau did it?—I’m not sure. Because I had never wielded a hammer, and also because I loved people and had taken abnormal psych and loved it, my mother ventured to ask whether I wanted to consider a double major, lit and psychology? But the siren’s call of writing never ceased. And while doing my internship at the community mental health clinic you reference, I was assigned this very scary case. Content warning here for violence against an animal. A mother brought in her tiny, five-year-old daughter to see me because the child had just killed a bird. It was the family pet. And as I raced to figure out what had made the girl commit this act, how to make sure she didn’t do anything like that or worse again—violent acts often escalate—it was almost as if life were a suspense novel. I sat down and wrote my very first (never to be published) psychological thriller. So in many ways, my career as an author was born, Athena-like, from the Zeus’s head of psychology. Till then I had wanted to be a poet. I had no idea how compelling crime and suspense and even horror fiction could be—even though I read it! In terms of ethical or moral dilemmas, there’s a reason that first novel never got published. Though I didn’t include any identifying details, it followed my real life as an intern much too closely. My first career now informs my writing, but everything else is made up, or talked over with experts, as you say—which include my mother! JBV: One of the story’s young characters, Geary, is neurodivergent (Autistic). How did you tap into Geary’s inner-self and unique abilities to render a nuanced portrayal of his being (rather than allowing him to become a convenient plot device). Also, tell us about the importance of capturing the dichotomous feelings of hope and frustration that parents or loved ones feel in their desire to relate to, or understand, such a child as Geary. JM: I’m really happy you read Geary that way because that was my intent and I love that kid. That said, if a much earlier draft than the final one—and this novel went through full rewrites in the close to double digits—you would have encountered a different, lesser version of him. I knew that I owed Autistic individuals a complex portrait, which put on the page how someone with a mind that works in unique and different ways lives and experiences the world. But Geary evolved over those nine drafts, and one big way he did so was when my publisher and I decided to enlist a culture reader. That person—whom I thank in my acknowledgements—helped me see the ways I had inadvertently fallen into patterns of projecting my own lens and not fully making room for Geary’s. I also very intentionally chose not to make Geary a point of view character. Although I deeply hope Autistic people and their loved ones will find representation in this book—and the full range of love and also frustration you mention—I recognized the limits of my ability to enter a vastly different type of perceiving and experiencing. We authors are always doing that, to some extent, and I love deep POV—another of the characters in The Usual Silence is a forty-something male Maine old timer! Which is not me clearly. But I personally feel there are limits. The reader sees how Geary’s mother—who is not neurodivergent—and his psychologist perceive and relate to him, but not how Geary perceives and internally engages, and for me that’s a crucial distinction. JBV: Much of the book plays out against the backdrop of the remote Adirondack Mountains. Tell us about the importance of this setting – both in terms of its thematic resonance and the realistic distancing from modern technology and surveillance. JM: A fictional town in the Adirondacks called Wedeskyull has been the setting of all five—soon to be six—of my published books. (And a lot of unpublished ones besides). Wedeskyull is my Castle Rock. My Yoknapatawpha County. It’s the movie camera that pulls back to an aerial view such that the viewer sees thousands of points of light, each one a lit-up home or a campfire; a person or a group of them. There’s a story to each and every one of those. And they all interact, layer upon layer, in the way of small towns. I also love—and fear—nature. And within that awe is the potential for an awful lot of drama. Three of my prior books have been wilderness thrillers, and in some ways The Usual Silence is one too. The remote location compels the characters to confront forces—both within themselves and without—that couldn’t exist in another kind of setting. The isolation that surrounds every one of us—even in a crowd—is a theme in this book and reflected by its sense of place. In terms of the fact that this also means there’s often no Wi-Fi or cell signal—well, that definitely contributes an ominous overtone! But I am careful not to make crucial plot points rely on this lack, even though it is true to the region. Because of how remote the setting is, even if a call were able to be placed, help would not arrive quickly. JBV: In the book’s acknowledgments, you note the exhilaration of working with a new agent and editor. In what ways did the collaborative process benefit the final manuscript – and how did you find this particular experience to be creatively (and maybe even spiritually) fulfilling in ways that others hadn’t? JM: This book came to be because a publisher reached out to my new agent and asked if I would have breakfast with her. This is a thrilling event for an author. And an intimidating one! At that breakfast my soon-to-be publisher planted the seed for a series. Meanwhile, back at the ranch—which is Thomas and Mercer—my soon-to-be editor was preparing to give me free rein (ranch, rein, get it?) with the book I was about to write. It was an exhilarating experience. I sat down and penned a tale, and then nine drafts later, amid some bleeding (hopefully only on my part), the book you read was ready. Many more people, brilliant and attentive minds, entered into this creative process than I’d ever had with any of my prior works. It was hard, but deeply soul-satisfying. So I guess spiritual isn’t the wrong word. One of the most unexpected aspects loops back to what you asked initially—that this is a series and I was able to create not just the onion of Wedeskyull, with all its layers to be peeled, but the onion of my series character. There are so many places she can go to, and things she will have to do there, that I can only hope I get the chance to write them. JBV: You have been refreshingly candid about the challenges of sustaining a career as an author given the publishing industry’s ever-changing landscape. In retrospect, what do you credit with the fortitude to stay the course despite setbacks and uncertainty – and what words of caution or guidance would you offer others who are considering pursuing this devotion? JM: Devotion is a great word for it. Another is joy—and that’s what enabled me to get through eleven years and seven unpublished manuscripts before I broke through, and then some pretty hair-raising twists and turns after. The sheer joy of writing a new story, getting to know the characters and seeing how everything plays out, is what keeps me going. While I pay for this when editing and revising, which is nowhere near as much fun for me, little compares to the joy of sitting down and writing a new book. It helps if there are people out there cheering us along. I always had a strong agent in my corner—validation from the industry—even when finding the love connection with an editor, or having a career that makes publishers come calling, was challenging. But I wouldn’t want emerging writers to feel that if they don’t have industry validation, that’s reason to stop. Find it in other sources—a critique group, a batch of trusty readers, your friend or partner or even your mother. A pet can offer the means to go on sometimes. Just turn outward for support, and whatever you do, don’t stop. At the same time, understand that this is both an art and an industry. The business side is real. And if you want a long-lasting career as an author, then you don’t just want any agent, you want the right agent for you. One who really gets your work and where you hope to go with it. And you don’t just want any editor and publisher, you want ones who envision you where you long to be—because they’re going to be the ones who get you there, both via making your book into one that’s good and smooth and polished enough to achieve your dream, and via allocating the budget and marketing to make that happen. They need to be committed to providing enough of a runway that you can take off. Which is a very tall order. You may only find it in fits and starts and stages—amid setbacks as you say, John. That’s how it went for me. JBV: Leave us with a teaser: What comes next? JM: I just turned in the second in the Arles Shepherd series. In it, Arles does something that’s needed doing for over thirty years. I couldn’t believe that it happened. And I wrote it. View the full article

Since I was little, I’ve been raised on stories of my parents’ history and the controversial romance between my mother, the daughter of South Indian immigrants, and an Irish-German nobody from the green ridges of Tennessee. You might say there was friction on both sides of the family tree over an unlikely union that nobody expected or wanted, except for the couple themselves. It was a marriage for love that—thirty-six years later—is one of the proudest things in my life. But my parents were always about something bigger than society’s norms, and both of them encouraged me from an early age to take both what you see and hear with a huge grain of salt, and to go the extra mile to find out the truth of a matter regardless what the popular opinion is. When I came up with the idea of a South Indian detective-of-sorts in nineteenth-century New York, I thought at first it was surely too improbable to be tolerated. But “truth is stranger than fiction,” as the maxim goes, and what I discovered in researching the time period surprised me as much as my parents’ experiences. It’s certainly no secret that North America is a hotspot for immigration. Perhaps you’ve heard the heartbreaking stories of those early immigrants from all over the world, the Chinese and the Irish among the largest communities to suffer prejudice in the country they hoped to call home. But according to an article by the Migration Policy Institute, there were Indians as well among these early 19th century immigrants. A look at Indian immigration to the United States reveals a dark thread in the rich tapestry of their history. Many of the immigrants were from the Punjab region, which had been annexed by the British in 1849, forcing many in the midst of political strife to seek a better, more stable life in Canada. At first, the condition of these immigrants was peaceful and profitable as they worked in the rising lumber industry. However, the peace did not last. An article I found on the KQED Asian Education Initiative website, described the rising tension between the Indian immigrants and the European settlers in Canada. Tensions rose so high that finally, any ships with Indian passengers were barred from docking at Vancouver. And the Indians already on Canadian land were once more placed in the position of seeking a new home, a new way of life, this time in the United States. It’s fascinating to imagine all this—turbaned Sikhs working alongside other immigrants to build up a sustainable infrastructure for their growing communities. But the thing is, it’s not just imagination. As inspiring as the thought may be, although the Indians did indeed prove themselves to be tireless and skillful workers and an intrinsic part of society, even marrying into Mexican Californian families, the discrimination did not end. The number of Indian immigrants was relatively small compared to others—about three thousand arrived at Angel Island by the time the 1917 law restricting immigration was passed. It was as late as 1946 when Indian immigrants were recognized for the first time as American citizens. This victory was a huge landmark in ensuring the rights of a people that had placed their hope in a country that denied them naturalization for over a hundred years. All this aside—did you even know that Indians were immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century? I certainly didn’t. My mother, an Indian immigrant herself who arrived in New York when she was six years old, had no idea that her people had helped form the roots of this nation. There are very few artistic explorations of this fascinating history, either in movies or books, and it isn’t mentioned in history at school. Why the silence? Is it really just because so many people like myself simply don’t know how diverse immigration to America truly was and continues to be? I’m encouraged by emerging writers like Brinda Charry, whose historical novel The East Indian explores Indian immigration to Jamestown, Virginia, long before the United States even became a nation. The complex issues of racism and the desire for belonging are themes that may be a familiar part of the historical record, but are as important to us now as they were then. Too many of us continue to struggle to belong in the very neighborhood we were born in. My own book may be fantasy—a historical mystery with a vampire accused of murder, for goodness’ sake! But the themes I explore in it are very real. It’s the artificial division between peoples based on race or social status that continue to be the cause of so much friction. Radhika Dhingra, the heroine of , is looking to establish herself as a working woman in a society prejudiced against both her sex and the color of her skin. She finds unlikely comradeship in her undead client, likewise shunned by greater society. It’s the kind of story that I most enjoy—two unlikely people from different backgrounds, suffering similar hardships, learning to respect and value each other not based on their differences but on the obstacles they can and do overcome together. These are the stories history is often silent about, a story that belongs to my parents and to many others. It’s a story that will always be worth telling, because it’s a story of tremendous courage, and friendship that overcomes every prejudice. *** View the full article

There weren’t many of us growing up in small town England in the 1980s who wore a fedora hat. Even fewer, who affected a slight lisp and wore an oversized trench coat with the collars turned up. In fact, certainly in our small town, there was just one. Me. Humphrey Bogart made a huge impression on me. He may have been long dead by the time I came along, but that didn’t matter, cool is cool, and Bogart literally had it in Spades. One of the threads that seemed to run through nearly all his films was the DA, the District Attorney. He was either fighting the DA, working for the DA, running from the DA, or actually the DA and again, the glamour of that title was a completely different world. According to the movies, the US District Attorney is either crusading, righteous and empathetic, or heartless, ambitious and corruptible and it was all so different from what I knew of the English system. I’m not saying none of those qualities exist in the English system, but no one role, or one individual, had such power that they could affect not just the outcome of an investigation but the sentencing as well. It was always fascinating to me, and when I moved to France and began writing crime fiction, I found another, entirely different system again. Firstly, the English police-judicial system is different from the US. In England the police investigate independently of the judiciary and present their case to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) who will then decide whether there are sufficient grounds for prosecution. The US system has the police more answerable to the DA’s office as an investigation continues, but for ‘wire-taps’ and other warrants, they must still go higher for permission, to a judge. The French system has all of these various offices in the one role, the juge d’instruction, or investigating magistrate. In the US, the DA represents the state, in the UK, the CPS represents the state, in France, the ‘independent’ juge d’instruction is appointed by the state, but represents the ‘truth’. This juge controls the police investigation and the judicial process right up until court. In France, they are known as ‘supercops’. Imagine being a crime writer and stumbling on that particular gem! The famous French novelist Honoré de Balzac described these investigating magistrates as the ‘most powerful men in the world.’ Now, given that Balzac was also known to drink up to fifty cups of coffee a day, it’s possible that he was given to frenzied exaggeration, but they are powerful, and they are feared. It was no accident that a former President of the Republic of France tried his best to reduce their influence and standing while he was in office, and then was subsequently convicted of corruption. The French juge d’instruction, for this writer, casts a romantic figure, up there with the great cinematic district attorneys of US folklore. Like the US, many of these figures seek political office, so does that affect their independence, their search for the truth? It shouldn’t obviously but writing crime fiction isn’t about the good guys, it’s about flaws. Flaws in the villains and flaws in the heroes. My first book featuring Juge Matthieu Lombard, is called The Man Who Didn’t Burn, and we join Lombard just as he’s thinking of leaving the judiciary. His wife has died a year before from a terminal illness and he is on suspension by the state under suspicion of tampering with evidence in a domestic murder. It’s time to move on, he concludes, friendless. When an Englishmen is found crucified in a French nearby village however, only Lombard can investigate, because Lombard himself is half-English. So begins an investigation where he must seek the truth from the local French villagers and a small English community who live with them. Being half-French, the English don’t trust him; being half-English, the French don’t trust him. And being an investigating magistrate who doesn’t like to just sit behind his desk as most do, the police don’t trust him either. What this situation gave me as a writer was the opportunity to throw in some great DA tropes of classic Hollywood. Is Lombard corrupt? Does he care enough about the job to do it properly? Is he prepared to risk his position to get to the truth? All of those questions arise, but in a rural France setting surrounded by chateaux, a medieval city and countryside and families that have barely changed in centuries. It’s such a fun mix to write. I may not have put Lombard in a trench coat and fedora but read closely and you’ll see that they’re there. There have been many depictions of the DA in movies and on television. Law and Order, the hit US drama, had some fantastic actors like Sam Waterson and Dianne Wiest showing the moral and personal difficulties of holding the position. Kevin Costner played DA Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK, a powerful man trying to fight the system. Batman’s arch enemy ‘Two-Face’ was a former district attorney whose disfigurement meant he was shunned by society, so he turned to crime, exacting his own sense of ‘justice’. Here are a few favorite classic District Attorneys: Johnny Eager (1941) Lana Turner falls in love with Robert Taylor’s no good hood who was sent down by her step-father district attorney. Knock on Any Door (1949) Crusading, born in the slums lawyer, Humphrey Bogart goes up against the DA to show that a case of murder was a product of a poor upbringing, asking the jury for leniency. Alias Nick Beal (1949) Incorruptible DA, Thomas Mitchell, vows to rid the city of crooks and help youth find a better way. He promises nothing will stand in his way, but has he made a pact with Ray Milland’s devil? Illegal (1955) Edward G Robinson’s overly aggressive district attorney sends the wrong man to the chair. He resigns, becomes an alcoholic and a magnet for the wrong type of client. The Enforcer (1951) Humphrey Bogart is a crusading district attorney with a chance to finally nail the mob boss and founder of Murder inc. The People Against O’Hara (1951) Spencer Tracy plays a former successful prosecutor who’s a recovering alcoholic. He makes a comeback as a defence attorney defending a neighbour’s son on a charge of homicide. Anatomy of a Murder (1959) Former DA, James Stewart, defends a lieutenant accused of the murder of a bartender. Why is he a former DA? Because he was voted out! Who would vote against Jimmy Stewart? *** View the full article

Few stories survive for millennia—but The Odyssey, the ancient Greek tale of a winning if embattled warrior’s long and difficult journey home after the war, is one of them. The 12,109-line poem—some 140,000 words—dates from around 750- 650 BCE. Attributed to Homer by most scholars, it’s considered one of the most influential works of literature of all time. Given that intimidatingly august pedigree, no one was more surprised than I was when I found myself calling upon The Odyssey when writing my new Mercy Carr mystery, The Night Woods. It happened by what turned out to be serendipitous coincidence. (Or was it coincidence? How much did my subconscious—every writer’s best friend—play a part in this? You be the judge.) I’d been asked to write a few blurbs summing up ideas for the next few books in the series for a new contract, and I just made something up, as we writers are wont to do. One of the blurbs went something like this: A very bored, very pregnant Mercy Carr befriends a Scrabble-loving, shotgun-toting hermit named Homer Grant living deep in the woods with his dog Argos. But when she and her loyal Malinois Elvis arrive at the remote cabin for their weekly game, they find a dead man with an axe in his chest—and no Homer…. I named the erudite hermit Homer because Homer is a great name. (I keep a list of great character names and I hadn’t used this one yet). And I gave him a dog named Argos, because dogs play key roles in my books and Argos is Odysseus’s dog, straight out of The Odyssey. Now What, Homer? I thought no more about it until about a year later when it was time to write the book—and I realized rather belatedly that by choosing the names Homer and Argos I had set myself up for a story steeped in the themes of The Odyssey. War, peace, homecoming, and the transition to the civilian world that so many warriors find so problematic. My heroine Mercy Carr is a former MP who fought in Afghanistan, and Elvis is a retired bomb-sniffing dog who served in that same conflict. I’d written about their homecoming and transition to the civilian world before. So I could definitely make that work. But I hadn’t read the epic poem since that compulsory class on Greek and Roman Lit back in college. I revisited The Odyssey, reading and listening to several of the best translations, including those translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Samuel Butler, and Robert Fagles. For what it’s worth, my favorite is the translation by Emily Wilson; it’s written in very accessible language that nonetheless reads as plainspoken poetry. (Claire Danes beautifully narrates the audiobook. I’m just saying.) Odysseus, Poster Child for PTSD I also did a deep dive on The Odyssey, reading around the subject to find that The Odyssey was often given to soldiers leaving the battlefield and arriving home. The story resonated with returning warriors, and could prove a therapeutic tool for such conditions as PTSD. In discussing this with experts, friends, and colleagues (thank you, Sarah Stewart Taylor), I came to the work of Jonathan Shay MD, PhD, a psychiatrist who’d worked extensively with veterans and written a landmark study called ODYSSEUS IN AMERICA: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. All of this research—my favorite part of writing a novel—eventually informed The Night Woods. Odysseus’s very name comes from the Greek verb odussomai, usually translated as “wrathful.” That is, to hate, to feel aggrieved, to be angry with. In The Odyssey, that same verb frequently means to cause pain or hold a grudge. The majority of translators agree that Odysseus means “he who causes pain or angers others.” Or, as translator Emily Wilson describes him, “a complicated man.” Odysseus is also a man of contradictions, who can’t wait to go home but manages to delay it a decade—and when he gets there, it’s a place he barely recognizes. And apart from the dog Argos, they don’t recognize him, either. Complications, Contradictions, and More Complications and contradictions are the stuff of crime fiction. The more complicated the characters and the plot, the better. The same is true for contradictions. I embraced both when writing THE NIGHT WOODS—and had great fun developing the characters and building the plot of the story with The Odyssey in mind. (Did I resort to stabbing a character in the eye, à la the Cyclops? Let’s just say I was tempted.) Write Your Own Odyssey As worried as I was when I realized that like it or not I was stuck with Homer and Argos of the aforementioned blurb, it was all okay in the end. Just like in The Odyssey. (Well, sort of.) Writing my humble homage to the ancient Greek epic turned out to be one of the most rewarding creative experiences of my life. I am forever grateful to literature’s favorite No Man. I even got the T-shirt. Part of the fun was noting all the books and films and TV shows also informed by The Odyssey. When you’re writing a book, everything you see and hear and read and watch—even the most random encounter—takes on a sort of inevitable pertinence. Here are some of the ones I enjoyed most: Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News? I love Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series, and this entry is one of the very best. And its aspects inspired by The Odyssey are only part of the reason why. O Brother, Where Art Thou? This wonderful film is The Odyssey reimagined by the incomparable Coen Brothers. Set in Depression-era Mississippi, the film stars George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill (Ulysses being the Roman version of the Greek Odysseus). It’s hilarious and inventive and I can’t help but believe that Homer himself would get a kick out of it. James Joyce, Ulysses Speaking of Ulysses, writing The Night Woods was an excuse to reread James Joyce’s magnificent retelling of the epic. I hadn’t read his Ulysses since college, and at the time I found it maddeningly obtuse. But reading it all these years later was an altogether different experience, one that I relished so much I started listening to the Friends of Shakespeare and Company’s podcasts of the unabridged text of Ulysses, made in celebration of the book’s 100th anniversary. It’s narrated by more than a hundred writers, artists, comedians, and musicians from all over the world, including Sally Rooney, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry, Pete Buttigieg, Kae Tempest, Ali Smith, and Joanna Lumley. In truth, I’m still listening. But what fun. Tales from the Public Domain The Simpsons, Season 13, Episode 14 In which the Simpson family reads a long overdue library book, and casts Homer as Odysseus, Lisa as Joan of Arc, and Bart as Hamlet. Enough said. Scott Huler, No Man’s Land: One Man’s Odyssey Through The Odyssey Scott Huler’s entertaining and surprisingly moving travelogue details the six-month journey in which he retraces Odysseus’s steps from beginning to end, from the ruins of Troy to the hero’s homeland of Ithaca. I loved this book. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, Circe by Madeline Miller, Ithaka by Adele Geras A trio of retellings of The Odyssey retold from the perspective of other people in Odysseus’s life: his long-suffering and resourceful wife Penelope; his lover and captor, sorcerer and minor goddess Circe; and his family waiting back home in Ithaca. All are creative and compelling stories in their own right. *** View the full article

Historically, to be a cook, to prepare food for others, was always to identify oneself with the degraded and the debauched. As far back as ancient Rome, and as recently as pre-Civil War America, cooks were slaves. Untrustworthy, unpleasant, and more often than not, unhealthy, cooks in early twentieth-century Europe and America worked in hot, unventilated spaces for long hours. They were underpaid, underfed, and underappreciated — and their cruel masters despotic, megalomaniacal tyrants, parsimonious desk-jockeys, and brutish warders. Cooks tended —as they still do— to drink. And they died, usually at a young age, with their livers bloated by booze, their feet flattened, hands gnarled, faces ravaged, their lungs coated with the sediment of years of inhaling smoke, airborne grease, and bad air. Their brains were fried by the heat and the pressure and the difficulty of suppressing mammoth surges of rage and frustration, their nervous systems frazzled by mood swings which peaked and crashed with each incoming rush of business. They sweated and toiled in obscurity, cursed their customers, one another, their underlings, and their evil overlords. They cursed the world outside their kitchen doors for making them work like animals, for making them bend always to another’s will. For existing. And yet they were almost always proud. Cooks knew then, as they know now, that the people ‘out there,’ — the ones who lived outside those swinging kitchen doors, the ones who owned homes, who went out to dinner or to the theater on weekend nights, the ones who had holidays off and who saw their loved ones for more than a few fleeting hours a week, were different. The world of the nine-to-five worker, the property owner, the regular restaurant goer, the boss, is completely and maddeningly incomprehensible to those who’ve spent most of their lives bent over a hot range. For a cook, the well-ordered safety and certainty of the kitchen, however hot, cramped, and occasionally crazed, is a place of absolutes. The chef is the Absolute Leader. Food is always served on time. Cold food is served cold. Hot food is served hot. No one is late. No one calls in sick. Let me repeat that: No one calls in sick. The world outside the kitchen doors, to the mind of the cook, is imperfect — a constant source of disappointment, a place of thousands of tiny betrayals which threatens at all times to intrude into their own territory. Mary Mallon, the woman who came (to her everlasting displeasure) to be known as Typhoid Mary, was a cook. Much has been written about Ms. Mallon over the years. There have been sensational newspaper accounts, plays, works of fiction, the predictable feminist reevaluations depicting her as the sad victim of an unfeeling, racist, sexist society bent on bringing a good woman down—her persecution and incarceration the result of some gender-insensitive Neanderthals looking for a quick fix to an embarrassing public health problem. And there is an element of truth in almost all these characterizations. She was a woman. She was Irish. She was poor. None of these, listed on a resume in 1906, was going to put you on the fast track to the White House or a corporate boardroom or even a box seat at the opera. Because, first and foremost, Mary Mallon was a cook. And her story, first and foremost, is the story of a cook. While that may not explain everything about some of the troubling aspects of her life, it explains a hell of a lot. Her tale has not yet, to my knowledge, been told from that point of view. Little historical record of Mary’s life can be depended on —and there are few recorded words or utterances from her own mouth. The accounts of the time, from others involved, directly or indirectly, with her case, are all too often self-serving, incomplete, sensationalistic, or plain wrong. Few, if any, take into account the worldview of the career cook. I’m a chef, and what interests me is the story of a proud cook —a reasonably capable one by all accounts—who at the outset, at least, found herself utterly screwed by forces she neither understood nor had the ability to control. I’m interested in a tormented loner, a woman in a male world, in hostile territory, frequently on the run. And I’m interested in denial —the ways that Mary, and many of us, find to avoid the obvious, the lies we tell ourselves to get through the day, the things we do and say so that we can go on, drag our aching carcasses out of bed each day, climb into our clothes and once again set out for work, often in kitchens where the smell, the surroundings, the ruling regime oppress us. Going in, I knew only that she was a cook with a problem. Few, it seemed, knew her real name. `Typhoid Mary’, the moniker she’s come to be remembered by, is now an all-purpose pejorative, an epithet implying evil intent, willful contagion; shorthand for a woman so foul, so unpleasant, so infectious as to destroy all she touches. If you were to ask a passerby who Typhoid Mary was, you might hear that she was a plague carrier, someone responsible for infecting and killing thousands. In fact, as I soon discovered, Mary’s total body count —for all her career — as tabulated by her most fervent and least forgiving pursuer — came to thirty-three persons infected, with confirmed deaths of only three. Although, in all likelihood, there probably were a few more uncounted, undiscovered cases associated with Mary. God bless her, she often worked off the books. So knowing nothing when I began this project, I soon found myself rooting around dusty collections, library stacks and archives. Research was fun, I have to say. I’ve been penned up in various versions of a 25-foot by 10-foot professional kitchen (like Mary) for most of my adult life, so it was a very new experience for me to acquire knowledge in silence, seated. It helped that I was writing about a fellow cook. The history of my profession has always fascinated me. Years ago, at culinary school, my fellow students and I loved the stories of Vatel, for instance, impaling himself on his sword over a late fish delivery. While we admired the seriousness with which he took his enterprise, we also thought, `What a punk! Who hadda cover for him the next day at work?!’ One of the best parts of being a chef or a cook is exactly that sense of belonging to something, of being made members of a large and secret society. It feels good knowing you are part of a long and glorious tradition of suffering, insanity, and excess. We may not have a secret handshake (though even brushing contact with the callused hand of another cook communicates, in an instant, scads of information) but we have a language, customs, tribal rituals all our own. There is a common structure, a shared understanding of the world, a hierarchy, terminology, and initiation with which we are all intimately familiar, and we take comfort in that too. If Mary was part of anything, she was part of a very different movement, one forged in hunger, dislocation and social upheaval, a sea-change which pushed millions of women out of their homeland and away from their traditional roles, across the sea and into the lonely business of domestic servitude. I have known, at various low points in my long and checkered career, what it feels like when one’s pride in what one does —one’s love of cooking, one’s faith in one’s ability —begins to fade, and I know the kind of sloppiness that can follow. Fortunately, in my case, those days are long gone. I got a second chance. Mary never did. Bouncing from job to job, with lousy pay, no health insurance, no sick days, no vacation, miss one day at work and it’s back on the treadmill . . . find another dirty, badly equipped kitchen . . . and no hope in the world. You endure simply so that you can afford to go on enduring. The small, simple joys of a perfectly made bowl of soup, a rustic stew, a lovely piece of fish cooked just right, disappear, replaced over time by a simmering forced-down resentment, bubbling up and choked down again and again like burning reflux. That you may have cooked good food in the past, worked in the homes of the rich, in great houses or great kitchens, seen the pyramids or danced naked on the moon, matters not at all. Nobody cares. Where once you would have turned your head to cough, you turn no longer. Wash your hands after going to the bathroom? Maybe. If you have time, you’re beyond caring. The people eating your food are abstractions now. Cough or no cough, you know they’ll be back tomorrow, maybe for the Early Bird, the All-You-Can-Eat special. Unwashed hands, an errant cigarette ash, a roasted chicken dropped on a dirty kitchen floor and retrieved on the bounce . . . we’ve been there, you and me and Mary. The central question when examining the career of Mary Mallon, cook, is always, `Why did she go on cooking when she had every reason to believe she was spreading a possibly fatal disease?’ Many of you who’ve worked in greasy spoons, coffee shops, cafeterias, failing, not-very-good restaurants, institutional food services, know the answer already. Cooks work sick. They always have. Most jobs, you don’t work, you don’t get paid. You wake up with a sniffle and a runny nose, a sore throat? You soldier on. You put in your hours. You wrap a towel around your neck and you do your best to get through. It’s a point of pride, working through pain and illness. And in the paranoid realpolitik world of the kitchen it makes a great deal of sense. If you don’t show up to work, someone else fills in for you —either an already overburdened fellow cook, who takes on additional tasks —or worse, an outsider, an interloper, a stranger who might well be considered to do a better job than you — or be less likely to call in sick in the future. When you are working in a kitchen that serves something less than haute cuisine, the likelihood increases that a strong back and the ability to endure are of the utmost importance, a chef or owner frequently passing over the superior technician for the more reliable one. Mary, it should be pointed out, felt fine. She was strong. She was tough. She could take it — and she was proud of her endurance. She worked, and she went on — and when after a time they told her to stop, she ignored them and went on working. One finds oneself being defined by one’s job. The job expiates us from sin; it excuses us our excesses and our lapses. That we are tired, or ill, or in extremis and yet persevere is all we have, sometimes, to sustain our image of ourselves. Mary learned her trade over time, the same way most of us learn. By watching, waiting, working our way slowly up from the bottom. By repeating the same tasks over and over again. It’s a terrible thing—the worst thing, when a good cook, a proud cook goes bad. When pride and proficiency turn to bitterness and sloth. When outside forces corrupt the desire to do a job well and take pleasure in the doing. It’s an awful thing to watch. It’s awful when it happens to you. It’s what happened to the cook, Mary Mallon. Try not to hold it against her. ___________________________________ From Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical by Anthony Bourdain, on sale in paperback October 15 from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © Anthony M. Bourdain Trust UW, 2024. All rights reserved. View the full article

My adult mystery debut The Treasure Hunters Club is set in a tiny coastal village in Nova Scotia that’s best known as the purported site of a hidden pirate treasure. But it isn’t just Captain Barnabas Dagger’s missing loot that casts a shadow over Maple Bay; Bellwoods, the dramatic, stately Victorian mansion planted across the bay on its seaside perch, has an equally tight hold on local imaginations. The ancestral home of a locally prominent family, Bellwoods is home to many of the novel’s most dramatic and exciting scenes, both in the past – as seen through the recently uncovered journal of a long dead resident – and in the present, when elderly Mirabel Bellwood sends a letter to her long estranged grandson Peter, imploring him to return to Maple Bay and the house his family has called home for generations, an overture with wide reaching ramifications. My home province is full of beautiful, often colourful, Victorian houses. Some of them have been well maintained, others have been abandoned to time and the elements, and many – like Bellwoods – have a front row seat to the ever-changing spectacle of the fickle North Atlantic. These houses have always fascinated me, and so when I set out to write a mystery set in small town Nova Scotia, it was inevitable that I feature one in the story. Bellwoods is just the latest in a long tradition of creepy houses in suspense novels, houses that tend to become characters in and of themselves. The dark, eerie, and often isolated nature of these homes provides a perfect backdrop for secrets, suspense, and sinister occurrences. If you’re a fan of spine-chilling stories where the setting adds to the mystery, here are some fantastic novels featuring creepy houses that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” It’s one of the more memorable and iconic opening lines in all of literature, and it points directly at the scene of the… crime? In Rebecca, an unnamed protagonist marries the wealthy Maxim de Winter and moves to his estate, Manderley, where she soon finds herself living in the shadow of Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca, whose presence still haunts the halls of the mansion – kept alive, chillingly, by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. Du Maurier uses the sprawling estate to full effect, turning Manderley into a living entity, brimming with secrets, deception, and lingering memories of the past. Hidden rooms, overgrown gardens, and windows framing a taunting, beckoning ocean help heighten the novel’s tension as the mystery of Rebecca’s life—and death—unfolds. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson The titular mansion in The Haunting of Hill House might be the most prominent house in Jackson’s ouevre, but for me, it’s the ill-fated Blackwood family mansion in We Have Always Lived in the Castle that looms largest in my imagination. The narrator, 18-year-old Merricat Blackwood, lives with her sister Constance and their ailing Uncle Julian in their large, ancestral home, which has become both a sanctuary and a prison for the family after a mysterious tragedy. Years earlier, most of their relatives were poisoned during dinner, and while Constance was acquitted of the crime, the townspeople still view the family with suspicion. The arrival of an unexpected visitor threatens their secluded existence and things quickly spiral out of control, building to the unsettling final scenes as Merricat and Constance commit to a new existence in the now transformed house. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters Fingersmith is one of my all time favourite novels, featuring a twist so delicious and elegantly orchestrated that I gasped out loud when it was sprung upon me. Set in Victorian-era England, Fingersmith is a crime novel centering on two young women, Sue Trinder and Maud Lilly, whose lives become entangled in a complex web of betrayal and deception. Sue, raised in a den of thieves, is recruited to help swindle Maud, a wealthy orphan, out of her inheritance by posing as her maid. As Sue integrates into Maud’s household, she discovers unexpected feelings for her, which complicates the plan. However, nothing is as it seems, and the novel is filled with twists and reversals, exploring themes of class, identity, and betrayal. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Mexican Gothic is a gothic mystery set in 1950s Mexico. When Noemí is sent to investigate reports of her cousin Catalina’s strange and erratic behavior, she moves into Catalina’s new husband’s family home, High Place, a mansion deep in the Mexican countryside. Upon arriving, Noemí discovers the house is an eerie and decaying structure, filled with strange and evasive inhabitants, and hiding dark family secrets. High Place exudes an unsettling atmosphere with its crumbling walls, strange noises, and hauntingly claustrophobic feel, making it a perfect setting for the disturbing events that unfold. As she uncovers dark secrets about the family’s history and the house itself, Noemí becomes entangled in a sinister plot and has to rely on her wits to survive. Home Before Dark by Riley Sager Riley Sager’s Home Before Dark follows Maggie Holt, who returns to Baneberry Hall, the Victorian mansion her family fled when she was a child. Her father went on to write a bestselling book about their time in the house, claiming it was haunted, but Maggie has always been skeptical of his account. When she moves back to renovate the estate, she begins to experience strange occurrences that mirror the events in her father’s book, leading her to question whether the house is truly haunted or if something else is going on. As Maggie delves deeper into the truth about what’s going on in Baneberry Hall, Sager expertly balances psychological suspense with supernatural elements, creating a narrative that constantly keeps the reader guessing. The atmosphere in Baneberry Hall is thick with mystery, making it one of the most unsettling modern creepy houses in fiction. The Third Wife of Faraday House by B.R. Myers The most recent novel on this list, Faraday House follows Myers’ previous gothic thriller, the Edgar Award winning A Dreadful Splendour. Like The Treasure Hunters Club, this novel also takes place in Nova Scotia, in 1816, and follows Emeline Fitzpatrick, a young woman with limited opportunities, who finds herself shuttled off to the titular Faraday House, an island mansion where she’s expected to marry the twice widowed Captain Graves. But when she discovers that the second wife is still alive, and gravely ill, Emeline realizes that her grand but isolated new home is more of a prison, full of secrets and battered from all directions by the sea. Helped along by some unexpected allies, Emeline is determined to find out the truth about Faraday House before it’s too late. *** View the full article

‘I didn’t have time to write you a short letter,’ wrote Mark Twain, ‘so I wrote you a long one.’ As with many Twain sayings, the origins of this one are slightly obscure, but the sentiment still rings true. It’s not easy to write short stories. If you only have a few words, then every one of them must count. The best short stories tackle big issues – life, death, time-travel – in only a few pages. Perhaps the form itself allows writers to experiment, to approach themes they couldn’t sustain for a whole book. When I put together my short story collection, The Man in Black, I enjoyed revisiting existing characters but also exploring new ideas. What happens when a boy who doesn’t like books meets Jo March from Little Women? What would happen if you saw a murder from a ski lift? What can prehistoric footprints teach us about living with a terminal illness? Many short stories are set in exotic locations and I really enjoyed sending Ruth and Nelson on a trip down the Nile, following in the wake of my heroine, and champion short story writer, Agatha Christie. Here are ten of my favourite short stories: 1. The Monkey’s Paw by WW Jacobs The moral of this story is: be careful what you wish for. An old soldier gives an impoverished couple a mummified monkey’s paw, said to grant three wishes. Ignoring the soldier’s warnings, they wish for two thousand pounds. How this money comes to them is the stuff of nightmares. Yet it’s their third wish that turns the narrative into pure, spine-chilling horror. 2. The Signal Man by Charles Dickens ‘Holloa! Below there!’ These are the first words spoken and yet their meaning is not clear until the very end. The signalman’s job is to receive messages but is he hearing a warning of a tragedy yet to come? Charles Dickens’ ghost story has become a classic and the structure, everything happening in threes, is still the standard for supernatural fiction. 3. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman A woman suffering from ‘nervous depression’ after the birth of a baby is confined to an upstairs room. She becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper and, gradually, starts to believe that there is a woman hidden behind it. Is she the woman and, if so, who has imprisoned her? Gilman wrote the novella, first published in 1892, as an attack on the attitudes of the medical profession towards women and, in particular, the treatment of postnatal depression. It’s still just as relevant today. 4. The Double Poet by Alison Lurie I’m a big fan of Alison Lurie, the American writer who sadly died in 2020. Lurie wrote many excellent novels, including Foreign Affairs, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, but her short stories are also exquisite. ‘The Double Poet’ is narrated by a successful writer on the literary festival circuit. She’s becoming tired and somewhat disorientated. Is this why people keep describing encounters that she can’t remember? Then, one day, she steps onto the stage to discover that her double is already in the spotlight… 5. Three Miles Up by Elizabeth Jane Howard Elizabth Jane Howard’s short story collection, Mr Wrong, is full of gems, including the title story which will put you off second-hand cars for life. ‘Three Miles Up’ is a chilling little tale that unexpectedly makes the leap into mythology and horror. Two men on a boating trip meet a mysterious woman called Sharon. When they invite her on board, their journey takes a completely different course. The last scene is one of the most chilling things I’ve ever read. 6. The Star by Arthur C Clarke A Jesuit priest and astronomer is horrified when he discovers the fate of a planet once inhabited by civilised and highly-evolved beings. This is an example of a short story that tackles a huge subject. 7. The Traveller’s Story of the Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins A weary traveller seeks refuge in a seedy Parisian gambling house. He’s pleased, and rather surprised, to be offered a comfortable four-poster bed. Then, just as he’s going to sleep, the bed starts to descend into the floor…This story, which was one of Collins’ earliest published works, shows his fascination with bizarre and fantastical crimes. 8. Mrs Todd’s Shortcut by Stephen King Homer Buckley narrates the story of Ophelia Todd, a woman obsessed with finding shortcuts. After a while Homer notices that many of her routes don’t appear on any map and that Mrs Todd seems to be getting younger by the day. Stephen King is the master of the short story form and I thought about this one a lot when I was writing The Frozen People, a book about disappearing in time. 9. The Witness for the Prosecution by Agatha Christie It’s hard to believe that this slim story, initially entitled ‘Traitor’s Hands’, inspired two films, a TV series and a very successful stage play. Christie herself wrote the original play script and, in the process, changed the ending. It’s still an absolute classic and, as is often the case with crime fiction, the clue is in the title. 10. Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad by MR James Every Christmas Eve, Montague Rhodes James, a professor at King’s College, Cambridge, would gather a group of friends together and entertain them with ghost stories. When his work was eventually published, MR James was hailed as the father of folk horror. ]Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ is classic James, combining folklore and archaeology with dry humour – and golf. Read it by a roaring fire… *** View the full article

I didn’t have to conjure the setting for my novel, Every Moment Since. It’s been with me since I was a child and my family and I moved out to “the country”—which is what we called the outskirts of the larger city we lived in. We moved to a ranch-style house set on five acres, with a pasture and a barn, a rabbit hutch, and an expanse of land beyond our property to explore. It was a normal thing for my father and I to saddle the horses and ride on a Saturday afternoon. My pony’s name was Sugar, and she spooked easily. It stayed that way for a while. Living in a place not far from civilization, yet close enough to get to it if you needed to, was a good way to grow up. My brother and I roamed all over, building dams in the creek that ran across the back of our property and inventing imaginative games. It was mostly just the two of us, there were no neighbors to speak of, at least not ones that could be playmates. I’m convinced that was a key element of what made me a writer—a lot of solitude, a lot of imagination. And then change began to creep in. A neighborhood went in up by the fork in the road just up from our house. It was an “executive collection” style neighborhood, built to appeal to the young families being transferred from places like New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Now, the houses probably seem modest, but back then they were considered big and luxurious. There was a farm that was sort of the centerpiece of all the land around us—a big sweeping place with a long drive leading to a quintessential southern farmhouse, flanked by a caretaker’s cottage that sat off to the side, with fields in front and behind featuring crops that, in my memory, seemed to change from season to season. Then one day I learned that the farm was being sold. I don’t remember why, but I remember knowing that, with the sale, more change was coming, harder and faster than ever. With an inevitable sense of foreboding, I sensed that the place I called home would not be the same very much longer. And I was right. The last time I was in my hometown I went back to the place where that farm once stood. It is now the site of hundreds and hundreds of townhome-style condos. The fork in front of it is a major intersection. But the neighborhood of executive-collection home remains. The home I grew up in is gone. Years ago developers picked it up and moved it off the land so they could build even more condos in the place where I once carved new paths in the woods, witnessed a calf being born, pretended I was Laura Ingalls Wilder. You might say it is all gone. Except. It lives again in my latest novel, Every Moment Since. With the aid of that imagination I once relied so heavily on, I brought it all back to life on the page: The two boys riding their bikes over from the new neighborhood, their mother wondering if they’ll be ok in the dark. The young man living in that cottage next door to the big farmhouse, annoyed at the sounds of children trespassing in the fields out front, a little girl who just moved in, wondering if she can join the kids who are playing in the empty fields. They are all there, in a place I may not can return to physically. But I did, in my mind. I hope I’ve done it justice and I hope that, in some way, it reminds you, also, of home. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Tom Ryan, The Treasure Hunters Club (Atlantic Monthly Press) “Ryan’s masterful interweaving of multiple storylines, surprising plot twists, and often eccentric characters makes for a novel that is as enjoyable as it is suspenseful. An edge-of-your seat, page-turning delight.” –Kirkus Reviews Michael Connelly, The Waiting (Little Brown) “Unputdownable . . . White-hot suspense guaranteed to please his fans. This ranks with Connelly’s best.” –Publishers Weekly Elly Griffiths, The Man in Black (Mariner) “Griffiths offers up a gripping assortment of pieces, generously peppered with the ethereal air and folklore that permeate her novels.” –Booklist Yvonne Battle-Felton, Curdle Creek (Henry Holt) “Battle-Felton imagines this world exceedingly well. And she never loses sight of the novel’s central theme: how the need for communities to protect themselves unleashes its own anxieties and traumas.” –Kirkus Reviews Alexander McCall Smith, The Great Hippopotamus Hotel (Pantheon) “Smith’s breezy latest outing for Botswanan sleuths Precious Ramotswe and Grace Makutsi finds the pair digging into the operations of a struggling hotel. . . . [featuring] Mma Ramotswe and company’s dryly funny musings and Smith’s evocative descriptions of life in Gaborone.” Evan Rail, The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit (Melville House) “The cultural history of absinthe, via an audacious contemporary fraud. . . . An entertaining survey of spirits culture past and present.” –Kirkus Hannah Martian, Long Time Gone (Crooked Lane) “Suspense and romance build in a story about the shattering pressures of hiding the truth.” –Kirkus Reviews Ian Rankin, Midnight and Blue (Mulholland Books) “An ingenious double locked-room mystery . . . There’s maximum suspense as Rebus tries to solve a murder that might be followed by his own. A terrific addition to the Rebus series.” –Booklist Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary (Bloomsbury) (reissue) On page after page, Bourdain offers nothing but compassion … He was determined to tell the familiar Typhoid Mary story from the point of view of a cook, a profession they had in common. –Washington Post John Grisham and Jim McCloskey, Framed: Astonishing True Stories and Wrongful Convictions (Doubleday) “The truth eventually came out in these cases, but that does little to lessen the impact of this sobering look at what happens when we turn a blind eye to injustice. A powerful and infuriating must-read about ineptitude and injustice in America’s legal system.” –Kirkus Reviews View the full article

Every so often Crime and the City feels the need to escape the metropolis, head for the hills and breath some fresh air – we’ve done it before to the beautiful Scottish Highlands, the vastness of Central Asia, and the wilderness of Alaska. Now it’s time for a trek through the Himalayas… But quite how to define the region? Well, they spread across the Tibetan Plateau east towards India with parts of the range in China, India, Bhutan, Pakistan and Nepal. There are some arguments – Kashmir for instance. Of course, the best known mountain in the Himalayas is Everest but there are a hundred peaks over 23,000 feet. In World War Two it was known as “the hump” as US pilots flew heavily overloaded planes of war materiel and supplies to beleaguered China. Now tourist mountaineers queue to reach the summit of Everest… and there’s some crime fiction too…. RV Raman’s Harith Golden Age-style Harith Athrey series is all about mountain air and murder. In book three of the series, Praying Mantis (2023), detective Harith Athreya is taking a well-earned break at a boutique hill in the Himalayan foothills. But his holiday is cut short when mysterious bloody handprints appear on the walls around the resort. Someone is bumping off the hotel’s guests. If you like mountain areas the first two books in the series may be of interest to. Book one, A Will to Kill (2021), takes place at the colonial era Greybrooke Manor, high up in the misty Nilgiris of Tamil Nadu. Then Grave Intentions (2022) sees Athreya investigating suspicious thefts on a riverside dig in the heart of remote Bundelkhand, a mountainous area of northern India. In debut novelist Ram Murali’s Death in the Air (2024) Ro Krishna is living the luxury life too at Samsara, a world-class spa for the global cosmopolitan elite nestled in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas. Ro is the American son of Indian parents, educated at the best schools, equally at home in London’s poshest clubs and on the squash court, but unmoored after he is dramatically forced to leave a high-profile job under mysterious circumstances. The other guests include a misanthropic politician; an American movie star preparing for his Bollywood crossover debut; a beautiful heiress to a family jewel fortune that barely survived Partition; and a bumbling white yogi inexplicably there to teach meditation. Then they start dying and Ro finds that maybe his next career could be detection. Kinda White Lotus in the Himalayas. Udayan Mukerjee’s A Death in the Himalayas (2019) takes place in the Indian foothills of the Himalayas too. When well-liked Clare Watson, working to protect Himalayan leopards is murdered concerns are raised. But when news that the celebrity author-activist has been killed India’s tabloid newspapers make it front page news. India, and the Himalayas, are unsafe for women! Local detective Neville Wadia investigates and has a cast of suspects to work through – a jealous lover, a dejected husband, a sharp land grabber, a wily politician or a disgruntled local? The sleepy hill of Birtola is an idyllic locale but a killer is within. Mukerjee is a well-known Indian television journalist who lives in Seetla in snowy Uttarakhand (formerly known as Uttaranchal) in northern India close to the Himalayas and the borders with Nepal, Uttar Pradesh and Tibet. Arne Drews takes us to Nepal’s Gorkha district in Himalayan Gold (2020). Three youths are being abducted in the hills. Inspector Sanjit investigates the distribution battles around a natural potency plant called Yarsagumba, or Himalayan Gold. A mystery but one rooted in the very real harsh living conditions of the farmers in the rural district of Gorkha and the tough lives of the village dwellers of the Himalayan foothills. The novel is published by the small independent publisher Varja Books of Kathmandu, Nepal. Arne Drews is a German doctor who visits Nepal and the Himalayas regularly and runs a healthcare charity, the Nepalmed foundation, aimed at helping villagers in places like Gorkha. There are several other Inspector Sanjit novels. Greed (2021) has also been translated into English as Inspector Sanjit investigates the illegal trade in counterfeit drugs in the Himalayan foothills. In Monsoon (2021) a hostel owner dies falling off a balcony while Inspector Sanjit investigates modern slavery, organ transplants and the effect of the rainy season on the life of the people in Nepal. In Network (2021) two animal rights activists are caught in a landslide in the Gorkha jungle Inspector Sanjit investigates the ruthless hunting of endangered animal species and in Demons (2021) an important statue is stolen from a temple in the wake of Nepal’s terrible 2015 earthquake. Dr Sarah Hussain’s In the Foothills of the Himalayas (2020) is a somewhat different type of novel – where most Himalayas-set books are cosies and Golden Age inspired, Hussain’s book is an eco-thriller. Born in the British Raj, Vidhya grows up observing her father fight for a free India. She witnesses catastrophic flooding as a result of deforestation by order of a powerful English company and begins to understand the importance of preserving the forest. When Vidhya uncovers a conspiracy that puts her in great jeopardy, she courageously leads a group of women on a non-violent protest and they embrace the trees. But at what cost? Hussain is of South Asian heritage but is based and working as a doctor in Huddersfield in the north of England. Let’s finish of this Crime and the City with a couple of Himalayan set true crime books…. True crime comes to the Himalayas too. In Jonathan Green’s Murder in the High Himalaya: Loyalty, Tragedy, and Escape from Tibet (2011) it is September 2006 and gunfire is heard on Cho Oyu Mountain. Climbers preparing to summit watched in horror as Chinese guards fired at a group of Tibetans en route to India. They shot Kelsang Namtso – a seventeen-year-old Tibetan nun trying to escape religious persecution – in cold blood. The climbers had caught undeniable proof on video tape. But would they reveal what they had seen and captured on film? If they did then they would likely lose the chance to climb in China again without visas. Investigative journalist Jonathan Green introduces us to the disparate band of seekers and survivors who converged at the rooftop of the world that fateful morning and the decisions they made. And then there’s Harley Rustad’s Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Danger and Obsession in the Himalayas (2022). We’re in Parvati Valley, a remote and rugged corner of the Indian Himalayas. Here comes Justin Alexander Shetler, an inveterate traveller trained from adolescence in wilderness survival. In his early thirties Shetler quit his job at a tech startup and set out on a global journey. In the valley he spends weeks studying under the guidance of a sadhu, an Indian holy man, living and meditating in a cave. Accompanied by the sadhu, he sets off on a “spiritual journey” to a holy lake – a journey from which he never returned. Rustad is a freelance journalist who specialises in stories from the remaining wildernesses of the world. This is true crime in a spectacular location and likened in style to Jon Krakauer’s classic Into the Wild (1996). The Himalayas are majestic, a mountain range without parallel in height, vastness and remoteness. Many come to climb high mountains, some to stay and find themselves in luxury resorts, other live there and endure a hardscrabble existence. A few come and murder or are murdered. View the full article

When he died, on June 9th, 1870, Charles Dickens left behind an unfinished novel. It seems to have been a murder mystery of sorts, called The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and he had only written six of the intended twelve installments. Dickens had told his good friend and future biographer John Forster a rough idea of the plot, but left no plan or outline for the remainder; “Nothing had been written of the main parts of the design excepting what is found in the published numbers; there was no hint or preparation for the sequel in any notes of chapters in advance. . . the evidence of matured designs never to be accomplished, intentions planned never to be executed, roads of thought marked out never to be traversed, goals shining in the distance never to be reached, was wanting here. It was all a blank.” Thus, when he passed away (of a stroke), he left the novel’s central mystery… well, a mystery. Scholar John Cuming Walters conveys just how well-done Edwin Drood is, prior to its abrupt stop, emphasizing the cruel irony of its lack of completion: Edwin Drood conveys the idea also that it would have been a singularly complete book, no detail overlooked, no hint unused, no character wasted, no portion unfinished. It bears no sign of haste, of immature planning, of uncertain result. A cold, hard, inexorable logic pervades it. It is literary clockwork, scrupulously designed and fashioned, every particle of mechanism perfect and polished, every adjustment made; and it is set going and proceeds with regularity; but the designer alone had the key to its secret operation, its marvel of movement to an appointed and fateful stroke. The novelist and critic George Gissing wrote of Edwin Drood‘s lack of clues about the identity of the murder in the first half: “One defect forced upon our attention,” wrote , “is characteristic of Dickens: his inability to make skilful revelation of circumstances which, for the purpose of the story, he has kept long concealed. This skill never came to him. . . There can be no doubt that the revealing of the mystery of ‘Edwin Drood’ would have betrayed the old inability.” The story is fascinating, though inconclusive by the halfway point. It is about a group of people whose stories interconnect in the fictional town of Cloisterham (it’s modeled on Rochester), namely the young man Edwin Drood, and his opium-addled choirmaster uncle John Jasper. Edwin is ambivalent about his betrothal to a young woman named Rosa Bud (Jasper’s choir student and the object of his lust), which is further complicated when two siblings (Neville and Helena Landness) arrive in the town. Neville falls in love with Rosa, and while Helena becomes her best friend. And then, Edwin disappears; some of his things are found by the river (interesting, given that the word “DROWNED” appears in his name). Jasper suggests that the jealous Neville might be responsible for this, and then a mysterious figure named Dick Datchery appears, and keeps a close watch on Jasper, especially when he visits his usual opium den, a strange place run by a woman known as Her Royal Highness the Princess Puffer. It’s intimated that Datchery is a disguise, but it’s unknown which of the novel’s many characters might be underneath. It’s also thought, given Dickens’s lifelong interest in detectives, that Datchery is in fact a detective coming to solve the crime. (I, personally, am partial to the idea that it’s Helena Landness, because I love lady detective and a disguised lady detective at that, but that’s just me.) Since shortly after Dickens’s death in 1870, writers (and musical theater playwrights) have attempted to pick up where he left off, trying to solve the novel’s central murder themselves and write an acceptable second half and ending. The strangest, though, was published in 1873, by an American printer named Thomas Power James. He claimed that the spirit of Charles Dickens had appeared to him and dictated the rest of the novel through him, and published a full version of the novel. Arthur Conan Doyle, noted spiritualist, found credence in this, and endorsed this “ghostwritten” continuation, saying that Dickens’s style remained consistent throughout the story. This edition endured in America far longer than it should have. That The Mystery of Edwin Drood ultimately became the consummate mystery might have intrigued Dickens, who was fascinated with the interplay between novels and their ability to galvanize performative, public sensation. It’s a frustrating and fascinating final chapter in the oeuvre of the nineteenth century’s greatest storyteller. View the full article