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Sherlock Holmes, the literary epitome of rationalism and clear-headed detective work, spent his career debunking and illuminating the mysterious, the unexplainable, and the supernatural. But Holmes’s author, Athur Conan Doyle, could not have been more different from his creation. A medical doctor by trade, he was also an ardent spiritualist. And once he put his Sherlock Holmes stories to rest, he devoted his life towards using his scientific qualifications to endorse the existence spiritualism, the fringe pseudoscience that insisted upon the existence of an Occult world. Conan Doyle was a devoted touring lecturer on the subject. And, in the years after the Sherlock Holmes series had ended, Conan Doyle had been engaged in a longstanding debate with Harry Houdini about the veracity of spiritualism, with Houdini deploying his knowledge of illusions and tricks to debunk examples of otherworldly intrusion that Conan Doyle believed were real. In the spring of 1922, the two men finally had a showdown. Houdini planned to settle the matter by inviting Conan Doyle to the Annual Banquet of the Society of American Magicians, scheduled for June 2nd at the McAlpin Hotel in New York City’s Herald Square. In his exceptional biography of Conan Doyle, Teller of Tales, Daniel Stashower brings the scene to life. Houdini was to be the Master of Ceremonies at this illustrious banquet, and the invitation list bore the names of the world’s greatest magicians, as well as major New York City luminaries, including Alfred Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times. In front of the greatest magicians of the world and a handful of titans, Houdini planned to present Conan Doyle with numerous examples of how spiritualist frauds worked, finally curing him of his longstanding superstition. But Conan Doyle, who believed that Houdini was truly psychic despite Houdini’s many protestations, brought his own equipment and put on a presentation of his own. Desperate to have the magicians admit that there were things even they could not explain or understand, Conan Doyle brought along a projector and played for them a silent movie about dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were clay models captured in stop-motion by Wills O’Brien for the forthcoming film adaptation of Conan Doyle’s prehistoric time-travel novel The Lost World. But the magicians did not know that. Only Conan Doyle knew. The magicians were utterly bewildered. There was no way they could explain what they had seen. The next day, a headline of The New York Times asserted, “Spiritist Mystifies World-Famed Magicians With Pictures of Prehistoric Beasts.” One day later, Conan Doyle came clean, publishing a letter he wrote to Houdini in the New York Times. “Moving Picture of Prehistoric Beasts Was Shown Just to Fool Magicians,” said that headline. In his letter, Conan Doyle informed the magician that he knew that the film was “not occult,” but claimed that it was important to “provide a little mystification to those who have so often and so successfully mystified others.” View the full article

As someone who has spent years living in cooperative housing, I will admit that when it comes to community, I’m ready to drink the cool-aid. But in an age of increasing inequality, an ongoing housing crisis, and increasing segregation between the haves and have-nots, I find it difficult to condone the concept of a gated community (or even an HOA—if I ever become a homeowner, I refuse to bow to the tyranny of protecting home values). Luckily, I’m not alone when it comes to dubious feelings about planned communities and exclusive housing opportunities. The following novels are all concerned with uncovering the incipient rot and corrupt agenda behind the proliferation of so-called Nice Neighborhoods and their dedication to enforced conformity and exclusion of those who don’t fit their increasingly rigid mold. Chandler Baker, The Husbands (Flatiron) Chandler Baker’s delightfully vicious thriller The Husbands is a high-concept response to The Stepford Wives. Baker’s lawyer heroine and her young family find themselves invited into a neighborhood promising a better work-life balance for busy mothers. She’s pleasantly shocked to see how many neighborhood men are sharing equal responsibilities in the home, but there’s a dark secret behind the previously reluctant partners’ participation in the home. Nicola Yoon, One of Our Kind (Knopf) At the start of One of Our Kind, Jasmyn and King Williams move into a highly selective gated community catering to wealthy and successful Black families. However, despite the neighborhood’s claim to be a Black utopia, none of Jasmyn’s new neighbors are interested in social justice or, indeed, Black culture as a whole. The town’s secret, when finally discovered, is both completely logical and absolutely jaw-dropping. Vincent Tirado, We Came to Welcome You (William Morrow, September 3) Vincent Tirado’s YA thrillers have already made huge splash, and their adult debut confirms a writer at the top of their game. In We Came to Welcome You, a queer couple is granted a rare opportunity to purchase a home in an exclusive planned community. Soon enough, the town’s promises of inclusion start to sound a lot like threats to participate or else. What secrets are the residents hiding? And what dark agenda drives the town’s strict and bizarre policies? This one comes out in September, but you can start looking forward to it now. Sarah Langan, A Better World (Atria) In Sarah Langan’s latest novel, set in the dystopian near-future, a family is invited to join an exclusive neighborhood in which only the most talented or wealthy can secure a spot. As the family moves in and gets closer to learning the community’s secrets, they become ever-more doubtful that this place is where they want to be (and increasingly certain that their new neighbors feel the same way). Lamar Giles, The Getaway (Scholastic) What if you could spend the apocalypse in the Happiest Place on Earth? That’s the conceit behind Lamar Giles’ brilliant satire of a post-apocalyptic Disneyland in which the employees and guests have been guaranteed safety; soon enough, the true class dynamics of the supposed refuge emerge, as Giles draws a frighteningly accurate picture of what money can pay for (before the inevitable revolution, that is). Gu Byeong-Mo, Apartment Women translated by Chi-Young Kim (Hanover Square, December 3) This one isn’t really a crime novel, but it fits the theme so well in other ways I couldn’t resist including it. Gu Byeong-Mo first made an impression on English-language audiences with her suspenseful and sleek thriller The Old Woman and the Knife. Her next novel to be translated takes us into a Korean apartment complex built to encourage families to have more children, but with the nation-wide housing keeping most families in inferior housing, the new complex’s mission feels more like coercion. To take advantage of the brand-new facilities, residents must promise to have additional children or give up their lease; while some embrace sharing chores and communal childcare, others find the complex to be full of extra tasks and the same old thankless, gendered labor. (If you’re reading this and used to live in a housing coop with me, I promise I will write something positive about them soon!) View the full article

Juliet Grames: Immigrant Detective. It’s not an official title, nor does it rank among the distinctions listed in her biography (though maybe it should). Those include Editorial Director at Soho Press, for which she received the Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and bestselling author of historical fiction. Her debut novel, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna (2019), was shortlisted for both the Connecticut and New England Book Awards and won Italy’s Premio Cetraro for Contributions to Southern Italian Literature. Her newest, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia (July 23, 2024; Knopf), was named a Best of Summer Staff Pick by Publishers Weekly. Both stemmed from her research into the Italian immigrant experience. Having grown up in a large, tight-knit Italian-American family herself, Grames learned the importance of preserving legacy through storytelling early on. It began with a desire to better understand her grandmother, who awoke fundamentally changed following a lifesaving lobotomy. Grames donned her detective’s hat and went down the research rabbit hole in search of the answers nobody could provide, even taking a leave of absence from her job to spend a winter in the Calabrian village where her grandmother was born. The eventual result was The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Luna, which fictionalized her grandmother’s life story while also honoring the sacrifices and struggles of all foremothers who suffered to ensure a better life for their children. One disconcerting fact that Grames turned up was just how frequently male immigrants had gone missing in their own pursuits of advancement. This would later inspire The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia, which isn’t a traditional crime novel but one that incorporates elements of the genre. The year is 1960, and fiercely independent American Francesca Loftfield has journeyed to a (fictional) Calabrian village to open a children’s nursery. But when a set of unidentified skeletal remains are unearthed in the aftermath of flooding, she finds herself agreeing to investigate on behalf of a bereaved mother whose son went missing forty years ago. An amateur sleuth by circumstance and skill set, Franca then embarks on a harrowing search for truth that also proves quite revelatory for her own self-discovery. Now, Juliet Grames talks about making fiction fit facts in her historical mystery … John B. Valeri: The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia isn’t a traditional crime novel but a novel with crime in it. How did the notion of unidentified remains serve as a catalyst for the book’s plot – and in what ways do you think the lingering questions surrounding that discovery enhance the story’s overall potency? Juliet Grames: This novel grew out of my research work in the Italian immigrant experience—during the course of writing my first novel, I often felt like I had become an immigrant detective myself: trying to track down missing pieces in family stories across the diaspora. One thing I learned was how frequently immigrant men have gone missing, never to be heard from again. I hit upon the idea of using the unidentified skeleton as a platform for exploring the various reasons immigrant men go missing. I did really enjoy inverting the structure of a murder mystery here—I wanted the puzzle mystery aspect to be a true brainteaser for Golden Age fans, and beginning with unidentified remains allowed me so much runway to build up that puzzle. It wouldn’t be a whodunit because the goal wasn’t to find out who committed the crime, it was to figure out what crime had even been committed (and why it had been so painstakingly covered up by so many people that human remains would go unidentified). JBV: Francesa Loftfield can be considered something of an amateur sleuth. What of her character and circumstances lend themselves to investigating the missing persons she hears about – and how does her role as an American school teacher help to legitimize her inquisitiveness? JG: Francesca’s character was partially inspired by a real historical personage, Ann Cornelisen, an American writer who spent the 1950s and 1960s working for Save the Children in southern Italy, where she opened nursery schools in impoverished villages. While researching my historical novels about Italy, I’ve reread Cornelisen’s memoirs many times (check out Torregreca or Women of the Shadows if you’re interested in what living in Italy during this period was like—both excellent reads). One aspect of Cornelisen’s day-to-day life in a village was being asked to help out with things that were completely not in her professional purview. She was an educated woman with resources; she also had special access to all the power structures of the village, like a friendship with the mayor and rights to go through sensitive town records (censuses, income, and property reports) on behalf of her charity organization. Villagers knew this, and came to her to help out with things no one else could—or things no one else wanted to help with. I thought all these qualities were exactly what my de facto immigrant detective protagonist would need: access to public and private records; the knowledge and chutzpah to work the system; and above all, a reason for getting involved in things that were really none of her business. JBV: While the village of Santa Chionia itself is fictional, you’ve visited Calabria in Southern Italy. How did setting foot in the land itself inform your ability to render a palpable sense of place – and in what ways did creating an imaginary landscape liberate your storytelling? JG: The town of Santa Chionia grew out of my obsession with Africo, a real ghost town in the Aspromonte mountains, which was forcibly depopulated in 1950 after a flood. The history of Africo is fascinating and extremely troubled, and I felt an urgent need to try to capture the drama so it wouldn’t be forgotten by time—that’s the trouble with depopulation: you remove everyone from a place and there’s no one left to tell its story. I chose to invent Santa Chionia—a neighbor of the historical Africo—so that I could borrow aspects of that true history but would have the freedom to invent the particulars of a murder mystery without accidentally treading on real and living trauma. Over the course of three research trips, I was very fortunate connect with generous people from Africo—in particular the great Calabrian writer Gioacchino Criaco, who took me to visit the ruins of the ghost town—as well as other fascinating villages in the area. I tried to absorb extraordinary details from all of them and stew them into one imaginary town that reflects their shared and singular experiences. (Read the article Grames wrote about the journey to that ghost town here, in CrimeReads.) JBV: To expand on that: the book is set in the early 1960s. What was your approach to establishing an authentic sense of people and their daily lives (culture, language, food, etc.) – and how did you then balance creative license with an overall fidelity to realism? JG: Oh geez, I just love research. For me it’s not balancing creative license and fidelity to realism—it’s the opposite. The more desperately I cling to research-sourced data points, the more creative energy I feel inside a scenario. Historical research largely imposes limitations (although yes, it also presents surprise possibilities!) on what your character can do. When you learn how scarce grain was in the mountains, you realize your Italian characters can’t lazily be eating pasta or bread all the time—now you need to figure out how to feed them, authentically, with lentils, goat cheese, and acorns. All that takes a lot more research, but it also makes every scene a little more interesting. Plus historical authenticity adds plenty of potential conflict to your character’s day-to-day life, and we’re all looking for conflict, right? JBV: The challenges Franca faces (or witnesses) – bigotry/sexism, civil/political/religious unrest, corruption, domestic violence, poverty, etc. – still exist in contemporary society. Was there a conscious intent to mirror the current climate or was that something that developed more naturally as the story played out? Also, how can fiction be used as a more palatable lens through which to view real-life issues? JG: You know, I couldn’t stop myself from channeling a lot of contemporary allegory into this story. It wasn’t that I set out to do that: it was that I loved the research points, and cherished the personal stories that came out of my interviews and my reading, and I just couldn’t avoid how much those stories chimed with all of the things I was worried about in my own modern life. Historical fiction should always give us a lens for looking at ourselves. You don’t have to try to make it do that; you just have to be faithful to the historical aspect and the universal truth exerts itself unavoidably. JBV: An unexpected flirtation causes Franca to ruminate on her past loves and losses as she considers a new romance. How did juxtaposing current day events with remembrances of her haunted history allow for an organic sense of character development – and why is an understanding of those seminal experiences important as she forges ahead with a new role and relationships? JG: Writing the narrative that way—looking back while looking forward—felt natural to me because that’s how I live my life, often lost in thought about the ramifications of past choices while I am making decisions about my present. JBV: You are an Editorial Director at Soho Press, which allows for unique insights into the business aspects of publishing as well as collaborating with authors. How have you found that to help in your own career development, both in terms of craft itself and your relationship with your editor (and receiving editorial feedback)? JG: I am so grateful for my time spent editing novels because it taught me how to edit my own novels—and in my opinion, editing is at least 80% of the work of writing. I’ve had so much opportunity to think deeply about other people’s storytelling, and to experiment with them on how to improve on what one starts with. Being an editor is what got me to being a writer, even though I originally thought it was the other way around. JBV: Leave us with a teaser: What comes next? JG: I’m two years deep in research for a mystery novel centering around a musician who disappeared during World War One in Italy—two more obsessions of mine! View the full article

An unreliable narrator is a point-of-view character who describes the story in such a way that the reader cannot trust his or her version of reality. There can be purposeful reasons for this—for instance, to hide their own biases or wrongdoings. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the character’s first-person narration is specifically structured to hide his own culpability (spoilers for a ninety-eight-year-old novel—the narrator, Dr. James Sheppard, is the murderer). But this kind of viewpoint is not always an intentional act. There can be extenuating circumstances; in fact, some narrators may not even be aware they’re not recounting the full truth of any situation. An unreliable narrator can weave a layered story that compels the readers to solve the puzzle of a tale with hidden aspects. It can allow us to explore complex characters with interesting motivations as well as to test to boundaries of our own biases. Best of all, it can make us think, to analyze intricate plot points, and reveal if we can see inside the true story itself. In Echoes of Memory, my latest novel, Quinn Fleming is also an unintentional unreliable narrator as a result of a traumatic brain injury. Still recovering months later from a brutal assault on a deserted San Diego street, Quinn cannot retain newly made memories for any extended period of time. She tries to hide her disability by keeping detailed notes of what happens each day, so when she witnesses a murder in a back alley, she tries to record every aspect of the crime before reporting it, knowing the clock is ticking. As a result of the stress and terror, by the time officers arrive, the horrific memory is already fading. She tries to rely on her notes, but the officers don’t believe she isn’t reading from a script. Crippled by guilt that the murdered man from her notes will never have justice, Quinn looks into the incident on her own. But even as she works with a San Deigo detective who understands her challenges, Quinn doesn’t trust herself or her own flashback recollections and withholds information, slowing the case, and, in the end, putting herself in mortal danger. Pi Patel, The Life of Pi—Psychological Trauma Following the tragic sinking of the ship carrying Pi’s family and the animals from their zoo as they emigrated from India to Canada, Pi finds refuge on one of the ship’s lifeboats. He quickly finds he is not alone, but shares the space with several of the animals—a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a tiger. The slaughter begins with the hyena killing the zebra and the orangutan, but then a tiger emerges from where it was hiding under a tarp to kill the hyena. From then on, it’s only Pi and the tiger adrift as sea for several hundred days, with Pi building a small, connected raft to physically separate himself from the deadly cat. When the boat finally comes ashore, the tiger escapes into the jungle while Pi is recued. When he tells the story to investigators, they quickly see the parallels between a boat of animals and the more likely explanation of other survivors who killed each other to survive. The trauma of the shipwreck and brutal escape have psychologically altered Pi’s view of the circumstances, revealed in his version of the story. Patrick Bateman, American Psycho—Mental Illness Patrick Bateman appears to have it all as a wealthy, successful, Manhattan investment banker. He lives the high life, defining his entire existence by the commercial brands and businesses he espouses. However, behind the facade, Bateman is a narcissistic psychopath who goes on a killing spree, each murder becoming more brutally violent and cruel, escalating to rape and dismemberment of prostitutes. As Bateman devolves, it’s not clear if the descriptions of his nighttime activities are the truth or gross exaggerations of a psychotic imagination, especially once he is haunted by hallucinations. In the end, after he tries to confess his crimes to his lawyer, Bateman is told one of his “victims” was alive and well only a few days before, casting every detail of his narration into doubt. Rachel Watson, The Girl on the Train—Alcoholism Even though she is unemployed, Rachel Watson rides the train to and from London every work day to hide her lack of employment—and her drinking—from her roommate. However, the route takes her past her old neighbourhood where her ex-husband Tom now lives with his new wife and their daughter. Rachel becomes obsessed with watching the neighbourhood, particularly a couple several doors down from Tom, and becomes convinced the wife, Megan, is having an affair. But her alcoholism leads to blackouts and memory gaps, so her perspective is questionable from the beginning. When Rachel wakes one morning, bruised and with cuts on her lip and head, with no memories of the night before, and then learns Megan is missing—and eventually found to be both pregnant and dead—she inserts herself into the investigation. Rachel’s perspective only begins to become clear once she struggles to remember her missing night and new information is introduced. Malcolm Crowe, The Sixth Sense—Missing Information Books are not the only form of narration. The film The Sixth Sense is narrated through the point-of-view character, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist. Malcom is freshly recovered from being shot by a former patient, and is now working with Cole, a young client who claims to see dead people who don’t realize they’re dead. When Malcolm is on screen, we only experience the events of the film through his perspective. However, by the end of the film, Malcolm finally comes to the realization that the shooting from the opening scene was, in fact, a fatal act. Malcolm has been a ghost all along, but didn’t understand his current status, even though Cole had been trying to tell him all along. He—and the audience—assumed he was alive the whole time. It’s an amazing twist ending, only realized through Malcolm’s unreliable narration. Forrest Gump, Forrest Gump—Naïve Innocence Though it is never clearly stated, it’s implied lead character Forrest Gump potentially presents on the autism spectrum. Throughout the course of his story, Forrest is involved in some of the most monumental moments of the history of his time and the reader experiences his perspective throughout. But the story is told from such an innocent, often rose-tinted perspective, even of some of the worst moments and experiences of the time—from the Vietnam War to the AIDS crisis, there’s a disconnect between the story being told and the reader’s own knowledge of history. *** View the full article

In 1917, the seventy thousand residents of San Diego had a decision to make: “Smokestacks versus Geraniums.” Few cities have the chance to define their future, but the candidates in the 1917 election for mayor made the two possibilities clear. Gilded Age bankertype Louis J. Wilde—for whom no industrial project was too big to finance—marketed himself as “The Smokestack Candidate,” promising good jobs and good wages through the development of the city’s deepwater harbor into a center for shipping and manufacturing. Department store owner “Geranium George” Marston—champion of Balboa Park and organizer of the wildly successful 1915 Panama-California Exposition—saw the city’s welcoming climate and natural beauty as its greatest assets, promising a prosperous future in real estate and tourism through beautification and carefully managed growth. Wilde had money and charisma, and he won the election with the backing of labor unions and business but soon got into a scandal, fled to Los Angeles, and died. Marston stuck around, lived to age ninety-five, and, through persistence and persuasion, brought the rest of San Diego around to his vision for their future. Geraniums it would be. San Diegans never regretted their chosen path. With the well-established United States Navy anchoring the local economy alongside their Pacific fleet, and a post–World War II housing market flooded with VA-loan-eligible buyers, the residential real estate developers became the power brokers of the city. The tourism and hospitality industries loved the place, leveraging the white sand beaches, ocean sunsets, pleasant-year-round climate, and a rollicking Mexican border town that had become a tourist attraction itself into a major vacation destination. The city adjusted its zoning laws and dedicated its resources accordingly. By 1985, the population of the greater San Diego metropolitan area had topped two million and moved onto the list of the ten most populous in the country. But San Diegans simply refused to believe it. In their minds, they were still a beach town, all fun in the sun, blue skies, and perfect waves, with a steady stream of tourists eager to spend their money to be there, even if only for a few days. “America’s Finest City” was what they called the place to outsiders, but among themselves they had a different slogan: “We are not L.A.” Los Angeles, one hundred miles to the north, was increasingly plagued with murderous street gangs, guns, violent crime, and hard drugs. San Diego had none of these, right? They even elected a mayor in 1983 on a promise to stop the “L.A.-ification” of their city, and so far, it looked like the guy was living up to his campaign slogan. At least as far as they could see. But that was only because they were not looking in the right place. *** When San Diego chose geraniums, the railroad tracks and freight trains that hauled products and raw materials across the country turned north, destined for the smokestacks and deepwater commercial port of Los Angeles instead. With them went the industrial and manufacturing demand for unskilled and low-skilled labor that attracted so many Black workers from the southern states and northeastern urban centers. The result was that the Black community in San Diego remained the smallest and least politically powerful among those of any major American city. As the rest of the city grew, the usual forces conspired to segregate and concentrate the Black population into a single area of the city, the Southeast, where it was guaranteed to be neglected and underserved. The federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation redlined the entire area of Southeast San Diego into the lowest Grade D-4 rating, recommending that mortgage lenders “refuse to make loans in these areas or only on a conservative basis,” due to “detrimental influences and an undesirable population or an infiltration of it.” With mortgages all but impossible to obtain, the community was denied home ownership and the accumulation of intergenerational wealth that went with it. The construction of elevated freeways carved up neighborhoods and commercial districts and allowed San Diegans to pass through the Southeast without ever knowing it was there. Suburban mega-malls doomed local retailers, and a 1978 statewide taxpayer revolt starved the area of the bonds and tax measures needed to maintain existing infrastructure and fund area improvements. Southeast San Diego nevertheless developed into a vibrant, culturally rich, socially active community with strong religious and civic organizations. But it remained economically disadvantaged and vulnerable. By 1985, PCP, crystal meth, and crack cocaine had joined heroin in ruining lives, spiking burglaries and robberies by addicts, and flooding the area with guns. Street gangs became bigger, bolder, meaner, and more heavily armed as meaningless turf wars over the color of a bandana became open warfare for control of lucrative street corner drug markets. As things got progressively worse, the residents and community leaders of Southeast San Diego seemed unable to get the rest of San Diego to recognize it had become a big city with big-city problems. That is, until March 31, 1985, when two white San Diego Police officers followed a pickup truck with seven young Black men up a long dirt driveway in the Southeast neighborhood of Encanto. Minutes later, something terrible happened. *** The sound of a terrified woman’s voice coming over the San Diego Police Department radio frequency was chilling: “We need help. We need help.” Police racing through the streets in response to the desperate cry for help barely took notice of the police cruiser that passed them going the opposite direction, its light bar whirling blue and red. Behind the wheel, a police revolver on the seat beside him, was a twenty-three-year-old named Sagon Penn. In the aftermath of the horrifying incident, the city of San Diego was left wondering how a police force considered one of the most progressive in the country when it came to issues of race and use of force could see two of its rising stars pull over a truck full of innocent young men on their way back from a day at the park, and still have everything go so terribly wrong. Sagon Penn, a soft-spoken and idealistic young man who believed his Buddhist chants could bring about the oneness of humanity, never disputed the violent events that occurred on that driveway in Encanto. San Diego was left to decide: Was there anything that could possibly justify such an act? For the city’s older, white establishment with their deep military traditions and rigid ideas of law and order, there could be no conceivable justification. But the Black community, numbering less than 7 percent of the population, had no trouble conceiving of such a scenario. *** Had the story of Sagon Penn happened today, it would be a national media sensation, transfixing and dividing the country with its shocking developments and riveting courtroom drama. But in 1985, San Diego, California, was still young enough not to have discovered a national obsession with true crime, and it did not yet have access to the internet and twenty-four-hour news channels to deliver stories of crime and punishment into every home at all hours of the day. Nor had the majority-white population awoken to the historically difficult relationship between the Black community and the authorities charged with policing them. For over two years, the city was forced to confront these uncomfortable truths about itself as it struggled with the realization that America’s Finest City had always been two cities living separate lives. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Reap the Whirlwind: Violence, Race, Justice, and the Story of Sagon Penn, by Peter Houlahan. Copyright 2024. Published by Counterpoint, LLC. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. View the full article

It makes my dark little heart happy to see how the young adult horror genre has evolved. It was far more limited when I was younger, which is one of the reasons I got into Stephen King so early (and when people ask me “Jill, why are you the way that you are?” I often cite the fact that I practically went straight from The Baby-Sitters Club to Pet Sematary). Modern YA horror is relentless, robust, and wonderfully diverse. We live in a dark world, after all, and equally dark literature can speak to teenage readers in a way nothing else can—especially when those readers can see aspects of themselves reflected in the characters they read about and root for. Here are some of my favorite YA horror novels that feature queer characters and diverse casts. This Delicious Death by Kayla Cottingham Such a violently fun take on zombie-type horror! A few years after a pathogen turned a portion of the population into ghouls who crave human flesh, scientists have come to the rescue with a synthetic alternative, allowing ghouls and humans to coexist peacefully. With things back to normal—sort of—Zoe and her friends (all ghouls) pack a cooler full of synthetic snacks and head to a Coachella-style music festival. When one of them mysteriously goes feral, it’s up to the rest to figure out what’s really behind their friend’s deadly behavior. This one hits just right in a post-Covid world. She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran There’s something classically, dreadfully satisfying about slow-burn haunted house horror, and this book shakes up some favorite tropes by viewing them through the lens of colonialism. When Jade needs tuition money, her only option is to play nice with her estranged father, helping him with the house he’s restoring in Vietnam. The longer she spends on the property, though, the creepier things get, forcing her to wrestle with the house’s true history and its connections to her family. With its nuanced take on the complexities of familial connections and the hollow feeling of never quite belonging, this ominous story is a reminder that those who live an experience and those who record its history are often not the same. The River Has Teeth by Erica Waters I can’t get enough female rage, and this one delivers plenty. When her sister vanishes and the usual missing-persons procedures prove to be frustratingly inadequate, Natasha turns to Della, a member of the mysteriously witchy Lloyd family, for help. But Della’s hiding a desperate secret of her own, and the truth about her mother’s fate and that of Natasha’s sister might intertwine in the worst possible way. Lushly atmospheric and haunting. Surrender Your Sons by Adam Sass This one blends a bleak scenario with an incredible amount of heart. When Connor is sent to Nightlight, a religious conversion camp on a remote island, he’s determined to uncover the camp’s secrets, free its inmates, and take the entire horrific place down. Sass’s skill with pacing keeps the story tight, and his ability to write protagonists who are easy to root for makes this one an absolute gut punch. You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron As someone who used to live for the slasher marathons that ran on cable TV around Halloween, I was instantly captivated by this book’s concept—and its face-paced execution pays off. Charity works at Camp Mirror Lake, an immersive horror game that lets players feel like they’re in a summer camp slasher movie —but when her coworkers start dying, Charity’s role as the game’s “final girl” gets a little too real. Charity’s relationship with her girlfriend Bezi offers readers a comforting respite amid the chaos. Reading this one made me nostalgic for the campiness of 80s and 90s horror. Foul Is Fair by Hannah Capin Something wicked this way comes in a satisfying revenge fantasy retelling of Macbeth. After Elle is assaulted by a pack of prep school boys, she reinvents herself as Jade and infiltrates their world, stopping at nothing to get vengeance. These golden boys are used to taking what they want, but this time they’ve chosen the wrong target. Raw and bloodthirsty, this ruthless-girl-gang story is reminiscent of cult-classic high school favorites like Heathers. House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland In Sutherland’s hands, gore can be absolutely poetic. When Iris Hollow was a little girl, she and her older sisters Vivi and Grey went missing for a month. They came back changed, with no idea where they’d been, and that mystery has followed them ever since. When Grey disappears again, she leaves behind clues that Iris and Vivi must use to follow her and learn the life-changing truth behind what happened to them as children. Brooding and brutal, this one’s imagery stayed with me long after I finished reading. *** View the full article

Peter Houlahan’s Reap the Whirlwind: Violence, Race, Justice, and the Story of Sagon Penn is an engrossing, insightful account of a traffic stop gone horribly wrong. On March 31,1985, Penn, a Black man driving a pickup truck carrying several other Black men, was pulled over by Donovan Jacobs, a white cop accompanied by Sarah Pina-Ruiz, a civilian hoping to join the department. Asked for his license, Penn tried to hand his wallet to Jacobs, who refused to accept it. This quickly turned into a physical confrontation, during which Penn—who, witnesses said, was fending off Jacobs’ unjustifiable attack—grabbed a gun from another officer, Thomas Riggs. Penn shot and wounded Jacobs and Pina-Ruiz; he shot and killed Riggs. Penn then got behind the wheel of a police car, with which he ran over Jacobs, who survived, while fleeing the scene. Minutes later, Penn turned himself in. In two trials, jurors, persuaded that the traffic stop and the beating of Penn were unwarranted, acquitted him of murder and other charges. “Had the story of Sagon Penn happened today,” writes Houlahan, who grew up in Southern California and lived in San Diego from 1979-84, “it would be a national media sensation.” In an interview, Houlahan, the author of the acclaimed book Norco ‘80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History, talked about the Penn case and its consequential aftermath, which included big changes in local policing, and, for some San Diegans, a period of reflection about racial discord. You do a lot of helpful scene-setting in the book. Before the crime, the San Diego police department was viewed as one of the most progressive in the country. How did it get this reputation? That came about not only with the political trends of Southern California, which were a little ahead of the rest of the country, but also with a police chief named Bill Kolender, who got the job in 1975. One of the first things he did was initiate a research project into the conditions regarding race and the treatment of minority communities. A few recruits had quit in the middle of training; they said, I’m not going to be part of this force. And he said, Let’s find out exactly what’s going on here. They found–and this probably would have been true about almost any police force in 1975–that there was a lot of ingrained racism, and that there were a lot of abuses of power going on. So Kolender implemented new training techniques, and he aggressively tried to bridge the gap between minority communities—especially the small Black community—and the police force. The Black community leadership was also reaching back, and they were really making progress. The Black population in San Diego, as you write, was then around 7 percent, about the same as now. Did Black residents feel like they had a voice in the community? The Black community in San Diego had been mostly overlooked by the rest of the city. San Diego had become one of the 10 most populous cities in the country, but it just refused to believe it had become a big city. The attitude was always: We’re fun in the sun, we’re an exception to everything else that’s happening in big city America. All the forces that segregated Black communities in other places had also been at work in San Diego–redlining in real estate, the carving up of Black neighborhoods by freeways. There were harder drugs than in the past, and street gangs were fighting for drug markets. And the Black community was feeling underappreciated, overlooked, under-served. Meanwhile, a lot of cops had been killed in the recent past. Did this influence how they engaged with the community? One of the ways that San Diego was refusing to recognize it had become a big city was the size of its police force. Western U.S. police forces, per civilian, were relatively small compared to the big Eastern cities. San Diego’s was ridiculously small. They started to have officers killed in the line of duty in 1975 at a pretty alarming rate—10 over 10 years. A police officer in San Diego in 1985 was more likely to be killed in the line of duty than anywhere else in the country. They felt they were under siege, and I think that was coming up in their relationship with the citizens they were policing. It’s against this backdrop that Penn is pulled over. Had he broken any laws? The two officers involved—Donovan Jacobs and Tom Riggs—were in the neighborhood on a call for a gang member with a gun, who had threatened another young man. They left that scene and were looking for someone who would match that description. They saw Sagon Penn driving a white pickup truck. Ostensibly, Jacobs thinks that one of the people in the truck could be their subject. That stop would’ve been OK if it had gone the way it should have gone. It should’ve been very apparent early on that nobody in that truck was doing anything wrong; certainly nobody had a gun. It should’ve been a quick conversation, and everybody should have gone on their way. But, of course, the incident blew up into something else. What became very problematic about that stop, is that when Jacobs was interviewed afterward, he said they made an illegal turn, they made an illegal signal, I pulled them over because this specific guy in the truck matched the description. But what was most likely happening is that Jacobs just took a look and said, I’m going to check that truck out. Jacobs had a reputation for stopping people without reasonable cause. And he goes up to the truck and says to Penn, in effect, I think you’re a gang member. Jacobs made a lot of what they call contacts—he got out there and he talked to people, and he made a lot of arrests. But his method was to shake people up. He gave people a hard stare or would ask people really aggressive questions. The idea was to see if they slip up, then he could go to the next step, which was probable cause to search. When he approached Sagon Penn’s truck, he was doing what he always did. Penn stepped out of his truck. It’s universally agreed he was doing nothing wrong, nobody in the truck was breaking any laws. I think what’s critical–because this is what the jury believed–is that Jacobs set the tone for the whole interaction. This—Penn—was a young man who was flustered, and a cop who was aggressive. The jury felt like the adult in the room should’ve been Donovan Jacobs.There were too many opportunities for him to get control of the situation. There’s a cinematic quality to your description of the neighborhood where this occurred. You tell us not only that there was a junk sedan sitting in a driveway, but also that it’s missing a fender. You tell us what Penn would’ve driven by that day—an auto-parts store, a tire store. How did you get this degree of detail? There is news footage from the period. The news crews arrived almost the same time as the police. There are also scene photographs. I, of course, drove the routes back and forth to figure out which stores were there then. Crimes are incredibly well-documented, and if it goes to trial, there is an excruciating amount of documentation. But you have to get out there and drive those routes and talk to those people. The same goes for your chapters on the trials. You write, for example, about the “hypnotic rhythm” of the closing argument made by Milt Silverman, Penn’s lawyer, in the first trial. You must’ve plowed through a lot of audio and transcripts. I had 80 percent of the trial transcripts. I had a lot of snippets of video. I had a very good idea of how these guys behaved in court. I talked to jurors and got their impressions, and talked to other people who sat through the trial. And I spent a tremendous amount of time with Milt Silverman (who died in May 2024). I would go back to him and say, I want to take a look at your closing argument in trial one. When you’re saying this, are you saying it this way or are you saying it that way? “It took the city” a while “to assess the damage from the Sagon Penn story being laid bare before them,” you write. What did the city see when it looked at itself afterward? It had not been a very self-aware city before this. I think what happened with San Diego was that they had to pay attention because this was so astonishing—it was so gripping a trial, it kept refusing to fit into anyone’s preferred narrative. And what they realized is that they had big city problems, and that they had a police force that was too small. The police instituted some things to make their officers safe. They mandated bullet proof vests, they changed holsters so guns didn’t fall out. They also put in a civilian review board. How would this case go differently if it happened today? The way this really would’ve played out differently is in the media. The thing about the Sagon Penn trials is that they happened before 24-hour news channels, before social media and cell-phone cameras. Plus, this was a city that still felt it was an exception to the rule; it did not have deeply entrenched racial politics like you’d find in Philadelphia and New York City at that time. I thought there was great value in slowing something like this down and taking a look at how it unfurled—not only at the incident itself, but how it impacts everything around it. And so while there was a tremendous amount of polarization among parts of San Diego, there was still a huge part of the city that said, Let’s wait and see what happens here, maybe we ought to try to do the right thing. I don’t think that would’ve happened nowadays; it’s too volatile. View the full article

Obsession, addiction, and disease: They are themes that coexist as a strange hierarchy of social horror, like the raw matter of what makes a subculture tick, and how self-destruction often takes control of the individual long before they can identify the source of the hurt. They are what fuels The Body Harvest’s Will and Olivia, the would-be main characters of a virus-laden story, full of the sort of worry and want that comes from people not only down on their luck but also wounded to the core. Their obsession is finding and overcoming viruses. Their addiction is that feeling of coming off the worst symptoms, that euphoria of being on the mend. The disease at the heart of the story is society itself and all its various pitfalls and traps. I’d like to think that The Body Harvest occupies a shelf full of books that showcase those three themes across a variety of subcultures both underground and mainstream. These are the sorts of books that showcase disease as a metaphor, or toxic group dynamics as a world unto its own. These are the sorts of books that exhibit thrills on a societal level, where the horror to be found is the way society operates and, as is often the case, willfully chooses to ignore the rot that continues to twist and contort its deeper circles. The following books would occupy that shelf; they are books that have rendered these themes in a balance that makes the very act of the reader choosing to inhabit the book be like peering into a dark corner of society. You find it as fascinating as it is frightening, and yet somewhere in those pages, maybe you’ve met someone that could easily have come from one of these books. Crash by JG Ballard We got to start things off with JG Ballard’s controversial novel, Crash. What is now known by many to be a fever dream of a story about people aroused by car crashes, Crash nosedives into a subculture obsessed with technology. They are so entwined with their obsessions that they live and breathe the fetish. James Ballard finds himself in the mess of a toxic group of people that share their interest in car crashes. Their leader Vaughan influences the group, including James, as they seek out the crash, hoping to be the star of their own deadly accident. For some the book is nightmare fuel, while for others, perhaps those reading into it like an armchair sociologist, Crash feels like a window into a subculture seeking an escape in their collective obsessions. The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera In The Transmigration of Bodies, author Yuri Herrera achieves something that is often attempted but seldom successful: He offers an uncanny look at the underbelly of a failing society. The book merges a plague narrative with hardboiled noir. There’s a city that is afflicted by a virus that spreads through its grimy claustrophobic spaces; there are crime syndicates and various hits being made. There’s our window into the world, a hitman named The Redeemer who finds themselves at the center of a war between crime families in the dying city. Herrera manages to keep the reader afloat through the grim reality that the society therein must face, even if it feels like there’s no way the story will end well. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick Perhaps one of Philip K. Dick’s most personal novels, A Scanner Darkly offers a darkly comic and at times shocking look at the drug culture of the 60s and 70s. It’s not just flophouse and drug dens though. Robert Arctor is an undercover officer seeking the source of the insanely addictive and deadly drug spreading like an epidemic throughout the circles of Los Angeles. Called Substance D, it’s reminiscent of the pill culture of the 2010s, and it’s incredibly addictive, especially for those without many options for escape. Arctor gets swept up into a subculture of drugs and paranoia, ultimately finding himself a victim of society’s heartless use and discard of people deemed addicts. Negative Space by B.R. Yeager B.R. Yeager’s novel may be one of the bleakest on this list (or shelf, if we’re keeping up with the metaphor), and yet it is also one of the most vulnerable and intimate. Written as an oral history of a group of friends living in a boring small town that faces something otherworldly. There’s a subculture of self-destruction, and soon it devolves into a suicide epidemic. The way Yeager renders the subculture is near perfection in its reflection of sickness and obsession. These are teenagers as aimless as they are worried about being aimless. Like anyone growing up, they feel the pressure to become something, and instead opt out by feasting on drugs, on self destructive acts, and more until reality itself unhinges itself from consciousness. Negative Space is the sort of book that doesn’t turn away from the worst that one might see when trying to understand the web of mental illness. Nothing by Janne Teller It’s so incredibly odd that Janne Teller’s Nothing is marketed as a young adult book. Maybe it’s some kind of act of marketing cunning or defiance, to have something this nihilistic and transgressive reach teenage minds. Who really knows. What I do know is that the contents within this book are the exact opposite of “nothing.” It’s about a group of teenagers, a social circle that falls apart from the inside out after one of its members decides to give up on life, climbs a tree and opts for nihilism. The group is disturbed by the act and proceeds to prove their friend wrong, gathering an increasingly disturbing array of evidence that aims to showcase meaning in life. The sheer obsession of their act mirrors their friend’s choice to do nothing: It’s that pressure to be a person, to have inherent value in their identity or else the world becomes too frightening a place. Nothing showcases a young social circle facing oblivion and realizes there’s no way to stop it. Severance by Ling Ma Ling Ma’s Severance is a disease thriller, yes, but it’s also something else entirely. Candace Chen is one of millions of employees of would-be faceless corporations in NYC when a virus changes everything, causing society itself to stop. Akin to what happened when we faced COVID-19, Severance showcases an accurate reality where gig workers, influencers, and other people seeking validation, people addicted to the dopamine rush of social media. It’s a great example of empathy, perhaps best showcased in how those afflicted by the deadly virus become caught in flux, mid task, repeating the mundane memories of their now defunct lives. It’s full of memory and pining, loneliness and aloneness, and most importantly a revelatory book that chooses to explore disease as a necessary, disruptive ingredient that forces society to look inward and find meaning beyond the pursuit of being an upstanding citizen that pays their bills, is able to have a social life, and essentially occupy the same role as everyone else in society. Blindness by Jose Saramago Jose Saramago’s dystopian novel, Blindness, would fit nicely right next to Ma’s Severance. They are both tales of a pandemic, a deadly virus that disrupts society, and what’s more: They both are dripping with a brand of empathy that shines through all the bleakness found in its pages. Blindness tells the tale of “the doctor’s wife” who is perhaps the only person unaffected by a mysterious disease that turns everyone blind. She pretends to be blind just to fit in, all the while becoming an unwilling leader-figure of sorts for a group of survivors trying to navigate the various terrors of a world compromised. Blindness explores how that disease brings out the worst in people, and in some ways, it could be far more trivial than the terrors people will do when such an important sense is stripped from them. Consumed by David Cronenberg Consumed feels like a vertical slice cut of some invisible subculture thriving in plain sight. Leave it up to body horror auteur David Cronenberg to pen a dastardly disturbing thriller built on complexity and a seemingly endless amount of conspiracies. It’s also sleek and hallucinatory, a book that captures that cross section of soulless media professionals and journalists willingly doing whatever it takes to capture society on its knees. Then there’s the layer involving cannibalism, fetish, and the untold pleasures (and profane acts) that take part when surrounded by like-minded terrors. Consumed is that sort of book that makes you second guess going to that party, touring a possible new social group, and/or believe the information media is feeding you. The Plague by Albert Camus This “shelf” needs to be bookended with Albert Camus’ classic. The Plague is timeless in its portrayal of a French city, and more so society, that falls apart in the face of a deadly plague spread through its sewers and public spaces via rats. Readers get to experience the events from the point of view of an ordinary citizen during the initially odd but unassuming omens. Rats dying in the streets in a pool of blood. Soon it’s people; by then society begins to show its true shades, Camus using the plague itself as a mirror’s reflection of society’s ability to destroy itself, become lost to the collective fear of disease and death. It also showcases how society is so obsessed with order that it will do anything to avoid chaos, even if it ironically feeds the entity, or virus, more fuel to evoke chaos. *** View the full article

By the time I got there, everything was cleaned up. That’s how it always was. Casings collected by the cops, or kicked by passersby into the storm drain; blood scrubbed off the sidewalk; witnesses with three days to vanish or make up a story about how they didn’t see what they saw. A boisterous boy with a huge smile—his high school yearbook photo was on all the 6 pm newscasts—shot dead through the face and lung. The police arrested Jacques. Not his real name, of course. They say he just stood up out of his car outside the nightclub and started shooting. The dead boy’s girlfriend saw it happen. The police story was easy to tell: straightforward and locked down. They got there first, after all. Still: When I went to the impound lot, I saw a puncture mark on the back of Jacques’ headrest, the plastic puckered inward. Someone shot into the car; something the police didn’t tell us. Maybe this could be a good story for a reader, or a jury—but some audiences would only find it satisfying if it ended in an accurate conviction, just exoneration, or some other restoration of order that looks like justice. And defense attorneys struggle to tell those stories, because they don’t map onto our experience of the criminal legal system or our understanding of ourselves. That’s why crime fiction is mostly written by, or focuses on, the work of police detectives, sometimes private investigators, maybe prosecutors. Not public defenders, who represent the lion’s share of accused people in U.S. courts, millions of cases every year. And that, in turn, means so much of what happens to accused people—so much violence, suffering, redemption, and even occasionally justice—doesn’t get told. Defenders don’t often write crime fiction—in part, because we’re not supposed to think of ourselves as heroes. A bad defender makes himself the star of the show, reducing the accused person he’s sworn to defend into an accessory: My client, he’ll explain, is not guilty. Putting aside the not guilty, which is two-thirds of the way to guilty—as a rule, a lawyer should be prepared to tell the jury his client is innocent, or he should hang it up—how is a juror supposed to embrace the shared humanity of an accused person whose own lawyer won’t use, or can’t remember, his name? The protagonists of crime novels are mostly the people trying to unravel the crime. In the best crime fiction, as Raymond Chandler famously explained, a person of honor, even if flawed, reaffirms a moral personal code by restoring a small part of a disordered society to order. But for defenders, lawyers aren’t the protagonists. The lawyer is a mouthpiece or an alterego—the agent, not the principal. You’re a translucent screen through which the jury sees the accused differently. So being true to yourself as a defender while writing crime fiction means telling a story where the lawyer may be the narrator but isn’t the subject. It’s not about you. The narrator can be flawed, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, and cynical, just like stereotypical detectives. Lots of defenders actually are. Laconic or voluble, either rings true. But, if they’re being portrayed as a skilled and ethical lawyer, and if the novel is interested in authenticity and accuracy, the lawyer can’t also be the novel’s moral center. That’s a harder book to write and a more complicated book to read. I have to hope, though, that it can also be a compelling read, because—like a good defense case—it opens up room for nontraditional heroes. In the stories that defenders tell in court, the jury or the judge is the hero. They’re the ones who will restore balance to justice, by acquitting an innocent person. And the people we work for are the subjects: people as decent, violent, loving, dishonest, resilient, afraid, brave, and venal as everyone else. If it’s hard for defenders to write as themselves, it’s also hard for other writers—again, if they want to write with accuracy and realism—to adopt the defense perspective. That’s in part because what defenders do is slow, patient, grinding, and infected with uncertainty. We don’t have the whole story, and we never will. We get there late. We don’t see the blood, not firsthand. We try to knock on every door on the block, but we can’t bring in a whole squad of rookies to canvas. We don’t have the threatening swagger or the showy beneficence that police can deploy. We don’t have warrants, subpoenas, grand juries, interrogation rooms, crime labs. People talk to police—or refuse to talk—because of the ways that police are different: they can protect you, or they can hurt you. People talk to defenders, when they do, because of what we have in common. We’re all hurt, and tired, and looking to unburden ourselves. Defense investigative work rewards patience, kindness, slyness, persistence, empathy. And like real life it’s all riddled with doubt. People assume we know what really happened, but we mostly don’t. Our single structural advantage is a monopoly on talking to the accused—a monopoly if, that is, he didn’t break under interrogation, or get recorded saying something stupid on a jailhouse phone call, or tricked by a jailhouse snitch. But I almost never came away from talking with my client feeling like I understood. I had clients tell me they were responsible for things I didn’t believe they did—maybe to help a friend, maybe out of despair. Mostly, talking to my clients just raised more questions. It took a full day of door-knocking even after we found the girlfriend’s apartment complex. There were hundreds of units, and all we had—thirdhand, from an old schoolmate; the police of course didn’t tell us where witnesses lived— was the street address. We sat with her on the floor and drank flat root beer out of Styrofoam cups, for hours. She cried, and eventually she told us something she hadn’t told the police: She saw Jacques with a gun, but she didn’t know if he shot it. There were lots of guys with guns out there that night. She didn’t know who shot first. Armed with that and with the evidence about the gunshots into the car, we pushed and prodded at the prosecutor. Eventually a detective admitted on the stand that it could have been self-defense. Jacques got out. A few days later, the dead boy’s friends found him and ruined his pelvis and legs with dozens of rounds from an Uzi, so he’ll never walk right again. We still don’t really know who did—either crime—who shot first outside the nightclub, or why. I don’t know if Jacques’ story, by itself, would be a satisfying longread. Nobody was wrongfully convicted or exonerated; nobody was held accountable for two horrific tragedies. I get of course that crime fiction is built around dramatic aberrations, the freakish and the extraordinary. And the defender’s experience does include moments of transcendent redemption, or warranted punishment. But more often the defender’s experience is of moral ambiguity, factual doubt, the tension between loyalty and exhaustion, wavering commitment, slow perseverance. That’s a part of the story that doesn’t get told, but should—if we want honesty, realism, and grit in our fiction about justice and injustice. *** View the full article

As I write this essay at the start of fire season, the skies near me are smoky from a blaze north of where I live. For many residents of wildfire-prone areas, the smell of smoke or strong gusts on a hot day can be triggering. We check our apps or bookmarked links. We text friends and family. Some of us pack go-bags, or record quick videos to document our belongings. For a few months every year, the threat of a wildfire is a physical presence—a visitor unwelcome who nevertheless returns year after year. When I started drafting What We’ll Burn Last, which involves the search for a missing girl, I knew I wanted it to take place during a wildfire. I went to work on my outline and created the usual character sketches for my three point of view characters—Leyna, her estranged mother Meredith, and neighbor Olivia. But I quickly realized I was missing a crucial POV. Where was the voice of the wildfire? Though without malice, the wildfire is an antagonist in my book, and I realized I needed the fire to be as much a character as the humans who are initially unaware of its approach. These scenes required extensive research, and though relatively short, they took the most time to write. There was so much pressure to get them right—to capture the ferocity of nature, and to be true to those who’ve survived these disasters and the memory of those who haven’t. Though challenging, these scenes also rank among my favorite. What We’ll Burn Last couldn’t exist without them. So it is with the unique perspectives included in the six books highlighted below. Security, by Gina Wohlsdorf The exclusive Manderley Resort, set to open on a Santa Barbara beach, promises state-of-the-art security. So the unusual perspective Wohlsdorf uses in Security is fitting: As the staff attends to last-minute details, the action jumps from camera to camera. Outside, the landscape architect tends to the roses. Manager Tessa makes her rounds, checking items off her clipboard as she travels from floor to floor. And a killer washes blood off his hands in Room 717. It’s unclear who (or what) narrates the story, but the cameras capture all, the mundane tasks of the staff juxtaposed with the brutality of the staff being killed one by one. The pages are often divided into two or three columns of text to show action as it occurs simultaneously in different parts of the hotel. The rapid-fire twists keep the adrenaline surging, and the distance of this unusual perspective may have readers shouting at the page—horror movie-style—don’t go in there! Don’t split up! (They don’t listen; they never listen.) The Last House on Needless Street, by Catriona Ward As any Google search of xenofiction will show you, there’s an abundance of books with creature POVs. Just a few notable examples: Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt (octopus); Hollow Kingdom, by Kira Jane Buxton (crow); and the story collection The Animal-Lover’s Book Of Beastly Murder, by Patricia Highsmith (a whole slew of creatures in that one). In fact, Three Bags Full author Leonie Swann even wrote on this very topic for CrimeReads. It’s hard to pick just one. Which is why I picked two. The first: The Last House on Needless Street. Not everything is what it seems in Ward’s novel, the unreliable narrators bound together by a terrible secret. One of those narrators is a bible-reading cat, Olivia, who lives with a man named Ted and, occasionally, his daughter Lauren in a dilapidated house at the end of a cul-de-sac. As a cat, Olivia offers a fresh perspective on events, as well as clues to a long-ago tragedy involving a young girl that might escape her human counterparts. Through her eyes, we also gain a more sympathetic portrait of Ted, as all the POVs work together to build dread and tension in a story that may leave readers slightly off-balance in the best way. Dragon Tears, by Dean Koontz After a shooting in a diner, Detective Harry Lyon in Dragon Tears is targeted by a golem who gives him sixteen hours to live. Koontz is the master of creating monsters, human or otherwise, but the emotional core of many of his books is the noble dog. (It’s often a golden retriever; don’t even get me started on my love for Einstein in Watchers, one of my most-loved novels.) So it’s not surprising that in Dragon Tears, stray Woofer gets his own olfactory-centric POV. Koontz brilliantly captures the heart of his canine characters, and their thoughts. (Bad dog. Not true. Good dog. Good. or I would die of lonely. If you know, you know.) The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold Brutally raped and killed at 14, Susie Salmon narrates The Lovely Bones from the afterlife. Despite the horror of what happened to Susie, it’s not primarily a book about crime. Instead, it’s about how those she left behind—her family, her friends, even her killer—react in the aftermath of her murder. As she watches from her own version of heaven, the perpetually 14 Susie grapples with her own grief and loneliness, longing for a boy and the moments she’ll never have. But she can also be funny, and at times hopeful—a complex character, and an unforgettable perspective. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak Set in Nazi Germany, The Book Thief follows a young girl, Liesel Meminger, who is sent to live with foster parents when her brother dies and her mother can no longer care for her. After Liesel finds a copy of The Gravedigger’s Handbook at her brother’s grave, she learns to read, and begins stealing books and sharing them with others, including a Jewish man hidden in her basement. What sets Zusak’s book apart from others covering the horrors of World War II is his unusual choice of narrator: Death. Competent but overworked, sentimental but never nice, Death offers an outsider’s perspective on the brutality of war, the power of words, and what it means to be human. She Is a Haunting, by Trang Thanh Tran Seventeen-year-old Jade Nguyen and younger sister Lily are spending the summer in Vietnam with father Ba, who she hasn’t forgiven for abandoning her family years before. It is only his promise of paying her college tuition that gets her to the 1920s villa he plans to turn into a bed-and-breakfast. That villa is Nhà Hoa, or “Flower House,” a French colonial where Ba’s mother once lived in the servant’s quarters. But it may not be the new beginning Ba envisions for his family, as Jade begins experiencing paralysis and is haunted by noises within the walls, insects in her food, and the specter of a beautiful ghost-girl from whom she has trouble turning her gaze. The house’s POV sections are titled with body parts, such as the opening chapter, mouth, which begins with these words: The house eats and is eaten. As a living, breathing thing, the house embodies trauma, as well as serving as a representation of the issues of identity and family that Jade struggles with. These scenes are as captivating as they are terrifying. *** View the full article

“What’s Denver’s dating profile?” When the prolific novelist, Rachel Howzell Hall, asked me that question in a podcast interview, I was stumped. “Is she sultry or what?” Rachel continued. “I want to know more about the city. Who is Denver?” Rachel’s question forced me to dig deep into why I write crime novels about my hometown. While Denver doesn’t carry the mystique of the usual suspects of Los Angeles, New York or Chicago, it is the only place I’ve called home and, for me, the perfect setting for a mystery. Denver is a beautiful place to live. Blue skies and painted sunsets are the norm. While many who live outside of Colorado think of snowy blizzards blanketing the Mile High City, we locals boast that we enjoy over three hundred days of sunshine each year. In her poem turned song, America the Beautiful, Katharine Lee Bates described what she saw traveling from Massachusetts to Colorado. ‘O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain.’ In Denver, the beauty Bates depicted is within easy reach. Spacious skies are a daily reality. Amber waves and fruited plains lie a short drive to the east. To the west, the Rocky Mountains are often robed with a majestic purple as they wear their crowns of snow. After a long pause, I assembled an answer to Rachel’s question. “If there’s a person who wears a mask and is in denial that the mask is on their face, that’s Denver,” I said. “My city is that person who looks wonderful from afar, but up close you realize that they’re wearing a lot of makeup.” Denver is a beautiful place to live and I love the city I call home. However, in this beautiful place to live, not everyone is living beautifully. Denver is a city of contrasts ripe with possibilities for any crime and thriller writer. There are many writers who’ve looked beneath the surface of this wondrous place and found compelling conditions for their crime stories. Here are five of my favorite books that feature the Mile High City: The Poet by Michael Connelly Between Connelly’s icons of Detective Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller, we find Jack McEvoy—a crime reporter in Denver who specializes in death. In The Poet, McEvoy is a crime writer for the now defunct Rocky Mountain News. His opening line, “Death is my beat” leads us into a world where a poetry quoting killer is on the loose in the streets of Denver murdering homicide cops. As former journalist, Connelly writes what he knows. The Poet is a serial killer novel compared with the likes of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs. Angels in the Wind by Manuel Ramos Heralded as the ‘Godfather of Chicano Noir,’ Manuel Ramos is a must read for Denver-based crime fiction. Ramos, a retired lawyer, is the author of eleven novels, the two-time recipient of the Colorado Book Award and finalist for Edgar and Shamus awards. In 2021 he was Inducted into Colorado’s Author Hall of Fame. A native Coloradan, Ramos infuses his novels with themes of family, culture, politics and Chicano activism. For Ramos, it all began in the late 1980s with his iconic character Luis Montez, a burned-out Chicano Lawyer and continues today with Gus Corral and his Mile High Noir series. Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden The accolades for David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s breakout novel are abundant. Time magazine named Winter Counts one of the 100 best thriller, crime and suspense novels of all time. Virgil Wounded Horse is a local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When the local authorities fail to protect victims, Virgil is the one people hire to deliver needed justice. Winter Counts takes place primarily outside of Colorado on the Rosebud Indian Reservation; however, Wanbli Weiden’s story finds its way to his hometown as his protagonist follows a lead to Denver. Not only does Virgil find that the drug cartels are booming in the Mile High City, he also discovers the caves, cliff divers, Mariachi bands and sopapillas of the iconic Casa Bonita restaurant. Annalee Spain Mysteries by Patricia Raybon Annalee Spain is a theologian turned amateur detective in 1920’s Denver. A lover of Sherlock Holmes and his deductive reasoning, Raybon’s protagonist also employs her instincts as a black woman to solve crimes. Patricia Raybon, a Colorado Author Hall of Fame inductee, shines a spotlight on post-World War I life for African-Americans in Denver, including the ever present threat of the KKK. Denver is not the sort of place we think of for white hoods and cross burnings but in the 1920s it boasted one of the largest memberships per capita in the US—Denver with 55,000 members was second only to Indiana’s 75,000. Book one in the Annalee Spain Mystery series, All That is Secret, was a Stephen Curry Literati Book Club pick and also garnered a Christy Award. Denver Noir Morally ambiguous stories set in every dark nook and isolated cranny of the Denver metroplex. Editor Cynthia Swanson says that “Even a city that boasts three hundred days of sunshine a year has its sudden, often violent storms—and writers have long taken advantage of that metaphor.” This anthology features short stories from over a dozen Denver writers. I particularly enjoyed A Life of Little Consequence by Twanna LaTrice Hill set in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and Francelia Belton’s Dreaming of Ella set in Five Points about a good-hearted trumpet player who makes a series of bad choices in his pursuit of fame. These are just a few of the many crime stories set in the Mile High City. As a reader, if you swipe right on any of them, you won’t be disappointed; however, consider yourself warned of what you might find when you get a closer look at this beautiful place to live. *** View the full article

Some would say all writers are criminals. We steal bits of reality to make our fictional worlds. But is using someone else’s experience in your fiction really a crime? That’s the question I pondered as I wrote The Widow on Dwyer Court, a domestic thriller about an erotica writer who owes her popularity to her husband’s active and creative sex life—with women who aren’t her. Thirty-six-year-old soccer mom Kate has never enjoyed sex, but she does love her handsome husband, Matt. They’ve struck a peculiar deal: Matt can indulge his appetites with strangers on business trips, as long as he tells all to Kate when he returns home. She, in turn, siphons Matt’s juicy tales into her fiction. Good story fodder is what gets Kate hot, and Matt is eager to oblige. But when he breaks one of the cardinal rules of their arrangement, somebody ends up losing the plot. Mine is far from the only recent thriller in which writing goes hand in hand with criminal or at least questionable behavior, often involving rivalry with another writer or “theft” of a story. In Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot, a frustrated writing teacher plagiarizes an idea from his deceased student and turns it into a bestseller. In R.L. Kuang’s Yellowface, a midlist author steals her more successful dead friend’s actual manuscript and publishes it as her own. In The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz, two writer frenemies must write for their lives to compete for the grand prize of publication. In I’m Not Done With You Yet by Jesse Q. Sutanto, a midlist writer (yet again, frustrated!) stalks the college friend who surpassed her in every way. Many of these novels are works of metafiction that feature excerpts from a book within the book that the protagonist is writing. This device is a brilliant way for the author to remind readers of the unreliability of all narratives and narrators, thus casting doubt on everything the protagonist tells us. In The Widow on Dwyer Court, I include excerpts from Kate’s work-in-progress in the Strong Lust series, starring hunky hero Macon Strong. Kate lives in Vermont, and I use the novel-within-a-novel to have some fun with the state’s dairy-obsessed reputation. In one excerpt, for instance, Macon seduces his cheesemaking intern on a bucolic farm. It’s easy to parody erotica, but I wanted my excerpts to be genuinely effective examples of the genre, as well. One satisfied reader tells Kate that the books have saved her marriage. The irony, then, is that Kate can write so well about something that she has no interest in doing in real life. Part of that is down to her stealing (or borrowing!) Matt’s experiences for material. But the skill with which she turns reality into fiction tells us that Kate has the writer’s gift of manipulating the details to spin a story her way. If writers build whole worlds out of words, one negative review can be enough to bring those worlds crashing down. So, in thrillers about writers, the metafiction device is often paired with the theme of the author’s fragile, sensitive ego. In Taylor Adams’ The Last Word, for instance, a woman suspects a horror author is stalking her after she leaves a one-star review. In R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, the “author” of the stolen book becomes a bestseller but is punished by her own paranoia and social media obsession, hounded by fear of discovery at every turn. In The Widow on Dwyer Court, Kate doesn’t have a writer rival. But her insecurity manifests in her fraught friendship with Annie, the titular widow, who just moved into the neighborhood. Annie is cool, fun, irreverent—and capable of actually enjoying the kind of adventurous sex that Kate can only write about. The novel opens with Kate having a blissful platonic threesome with Matt and the written word. But Annie disrupts that bliss, activating all Kate’s feelings of inadequacy and brewing up a recipe for trouble. Can we trust everything Kate tells us? I won’t spoil the book by answering that question. But I can say that metafiction is a great tool for encouraging readers to question everything. And by keeping them off balance, we also keep them in suspense—the first task of every thriller writer. *** View the full article

Brian Winchester and Denise Williams began a torrid affair in the late 90s, and soon enough decided they wanted to be together for real. The problem? Their communities and families would judge them harshly for getting divorced. They decided the only solution to their problem would be found in murder. In the crowd, Brian and Denise pressed against each other. They kissed and made out in the dark. October 13, 1997, became their secret anniversary. The two couples had gone to see the rock band Sister Hazel at Floyd’s Music Store, a concert venue in downtown Tallahassee. The lights were low, the music loud, and Brian and Denise disappeared into the crowd. The need for secrecy amped the tension to fever pitch. After the concert, they stayed up all night talking on the phone. “We really connected, like nobody else,” said Brian. “We met up the next day during her lunch break at work, and that’s just what started the whole ball rolling with her and I.” They’d both been taught that abstaining from sex before marriage would lead to spiritual, physical, and emotional satisfaction. All their lives, they’d struggled to follow the Bible, and when the time came for them to reap their reward, it wasn’t there. They felt cheated. Now a door had opened. Forbidden sex, it turned out, was a lot more exciting than anything that happened at home. At the same time, they couldn’t set aside what they’d learned in church—that adultery was a terrible sin. They could go to hell for what they were doing—which made it even hotter. Denise, in Brian’s words, was “off the charts in bed,” although they hooked up more often out of bed than in it. Like teenagers, they did it in the car, getting to know places they wouldn’t be disturbed. Church parking lots were good for that, ironically. They’d sometimes meet outside Home Depot or at the back of Keiser University, leave one of their vehicles there, and drive off in the other. Logistically, it was easier for Brian than Denise—he didn’t have to clock in and out. Mostly, they met during her lunch break; she had an hour off work but often took longer. If they had time, they’d get a room at the Ramada or the Hilton or go to Denise’s house since Mike was always at work. “There was a church in the woods off of Meridian,” Brian recalled. “I would park at that church. And there was a drainage ditch that ran from the church through the woods into her neighborhood and I would walk down the drainage ditch.” When he hooked up with Denise, Brian found everything that had been missing in his marriage—and more. He was spellbound. “I told her all my dirty secrets. She shared her secrets with me about the same things,” he said. “ I had found a woman who shared my enthusiasm for forbidden sexual activities.” They urged each other on, exploring fetishes and fantasies, plotting schemes, taking risks. It was intense. Sometimes they had sex in public places. They once did it on a roof of the state capitol building. They also managed to meet up out of town when one or the other of them was on a business trip. They hooked up at the Plaza Hotel in New York, in South Beach, Orlando, Destin, and—more than once—in a hotel at Panama City Beach. Just two hours from Tallahassee and a popular destination for college students on spring break, the town was a place to cut loose. Parts of the beachfront had a debauched atmosphere, with adult movie theaters, massage parlors, and swingers’ bars. Brian liked the strip clubs, especially the Show N Tail, with its low lights, padded booths, and mirrored ceiling. He loved going there with Denise, who didn’t get jealous when he looked at the dancers and sometimes even joined him in a threesome with a stripper. The only time Mike traveled was for business, and Denise often went along. If the trip was local, she’d arrange with Brian to hook up at their hotel when Mike was busy at work. Despite the risks, they didn’t get caught—although there were some awkward moments and a couple of close calls. They ran into one of Denise’s sisters in a Tallahassee shopping mall, and once, when leaving a strip club in Panama City, they met a buddy of Brian’s who was on his way in. The affair was supercharged, the sex darkly obsessive and intense. They did it up to fifteen times a week. The boldness of their transgression reinforced their mutual admiration, their sense that they were special, smarter than others. After years of obedience and good behavior, they got a big kick out of outwitting their spouses and their families, behaving recklessly, taking perilous chances. Drawn to the edge, they took dangerous risks, gambling on their cleverness and nerve. Their audacity paid off. “We were pretty good at getting away with things,” Brian would recall. To grow and thrive, an extramarital affair needs isolation from society and the external world. Brian and Denise began to retreat into a private dyad, apart from the wider community. The sex got more intense, and still they didn’t get caught—probably because the affair was so shocking, no one could ever conceive of such a thing. (Psychologists call this “inattention blindness”—we don’t notice things that we’re not expecting to see, even if they’re right in front of our eyes.) It’s been shown that sexual experiences, even if they’re only fantasies, cause a slackening of religious aspirations and moral behavior, possibly due to their release of self-control. Accordingly, Brian and Denise’s secret connection drew them away from the church. Those around them suddenly seemed narrow-minded and obtuse. Religion, duty, and family faded into the background, along with concern for the welfare of others. “I had a good wife. . . . And I had Denise on the side . . . in my mind, I had it pretty good.” Why make waves? Brian was happy with the status quo. Denise was less blasé, especially after she got pregnant in 1997 (with Kathy following suit in 1998). In public, everyone was thrilled, but in private, Denise was anxious. She’d tried to use protection with Brian, but they’d been reckless, and she couldn’t be 100 percent sure the baby was Mike’s. On top of that, the timing was awkward—the child came just as she was starting to feel most ambivalent about her marriage. “When we were out at their house for parties or whatever, there was no outward affection between [Mike and Denise],” observed Clay Ketcham’s wife, Patti. To Denise, Brian made Mike seem dull and ordinary. Being pregnant was a good excuse for her to stop having sex with him. And Brian “kept her juices flowing.” After the baby was born, sex became a problem. Denise had been making excuses to Mike for almost a year, using her postpartum depression as an alibi. When it lifted, she told Mike she was still sore from giving birth. Having a baby made her stop and think carefully about what she was doing, and she realized she was in love with Brian. He felt the same way. “The more we were together, the more we wanted to be together,” he said. “It just snowballed. It got worse and worse.” Now that both couples had young children at home, however, the lovers couldn’t hook up as easily as they used to. Everybody was getting frustrated. As their relationship became deeper and more serious, Denise and Brian were drawn back into their faith. They started going to church more regularly, justifying their adulterous relationship by telling themselves God sanctioned their love. Why else would he have led them to each other? At the same time, they began, in Brian’s elusive phrasing, “talking about options and ways that we could be together.” Divorce was the obvious solution, but it would have been devastating to their families. When Denise’s younger sister Deborah had decided she wanted to get married right out of school without going to college, Cheryl remembered a time when her parents had thrown her out of the house. “Warren took all Deborah’s belongings, clothes and everything, and threw them out in the front yard,” recalled Cheryl. “Johnnie and Warren were members of Parkwood Baptist Church. . . . Half of the church sided with Deborah and David over the fact that Warren shouldn’t have thrown her out, and the other half sided with Warren and Johnnie.” Cheryl recalled Deborah’s parents didn’t speak to her for years. To Denise in particular, divorce was out of the question. She’d been raised to believe divorce was against the Bible, and she couldn’t get over it. “Denise, because of the way she was raised, because of her pride, I guess I can’t say all the reasons, but she did not want to get divorced,” said Brian. She was too self-righteous, too concerned about family and appearances. Social status, money, and her daughter’s interests all spoke against it. More significantly, she didn’t want to share custody of Anslee with Mike. “Better to be a rich widow than a poor divorcée.” It’s difficult to believe anybody could find murder more palatable than divorce. Morality aside, the risks are enormous. But undue reflection can weigh heavily on the brain, and if a desire is strong enough, cognitive distortions will find a way around moral inhibition. A couple torn apart by the conflicting demands of family, church, and community might begin to convince themselves that murder is the only way out. In the United States, annual FBI statistics (for those that are solved) suggest that a high proportion of murders are committed by someone known to the victim, usually their spouse or intimate partner, often to avoid the consequences of divorce. For men, it’s primarily financial loss they fear—men, more often than women, end up working to support a family they no longer have. For women, the greatest anxiety is losing custody of their children. Although the murder may be carried out so a couple can be together, these aren’t crimes of passion but deeds that are carefully planned, sometimes for years. They are “cold” rather than “hot” acts, transgressions with forethought. Not the heat of the moment, but premeditated murder. ________________________ Copyright © 2024 by Mikita Brottman from the forthcoming book GUILTY CREATURES by Mikita Brottman to be published by One Signal Publishers/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Printed by permission. View the full article

THE AUTHOR Having just survived writing a speculative mystery novel that allows readers choose what happens at certain points in the story, when CrimReads asked me to write an essay about the experience in the same format, I felt: Terror Excitement * TERROR It’s already hard enough to write a book. But to write one in which there are multiple versions of the main character’s story, all of which make sense, and more importantly, all of which feel just as true, was a whole new beast entirely. What if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew? What if readers think it’s too weird? What if I fail? The writing of the manuscript really was like a microcosm for life. And this is the thing, both about writing and about life: one of the best parts is getting to make choices about what’s most important, because that’s how you define yourself as “you”—and one of the hardest parts is having to make choices about what’s most important, because you might get it wrong. And if you do, how do you live with that? Nostalgia No Good Options * NOSTALGIA Many of us are familiar with the children’s Choose Your Own Adventure series of books from our childhood, in which you start as a blank “You” canvas and are immediately launched into an outlandishly fun adventure in outer space or on the open seas or deep in some jungle. Why did we all love that series so much as kids? What was it about those paperbacks that could transport us somewhere else for entire afternoons at a time? My personal theory is that choice is exciting to children because at that age, you almost never get to make them. Most of your life is dictated by your parents or your teachers, and so any opportunity to exercise some autonomy, no matter how trivial, is thrilling. If you put on a blue shirt for bed, will the aliens invade Earth? If you have the granola instead of the chocolate puffs, will a portal open in your basement? But when you’re an adult, the game changes. Now you have entirely too much choice, none of which leads to extraterrestrials or SCUBA diving for lost treasure in the Bermuda Triangle. The responsibilities can be so much, we might almost wish that sometimes, the pressure of choosing could briefly be taken away from us again. Then it was. You can only go to “No Good Options” * NO GOOD OPTIONS In January 2020, my life was upside down. I was living in a city that didn’t feel like home to me and missing New York, deeply stuck on the final draft of my previous novel, The Cartographers (which was one of the hardest revisions I’ve ever done), and dealing with some serious family issues. And then, well… we all know what happened. Overnight, the world went from a race to a standstill. And during that enforced pause, it was hard for us not to look inward and take an inventory of our lives—myself included. Was I happy? Had I made the right choices? Should I throw it all away and try to start over? Should I just go stand outside in the grass for five minutes and then Zoom a friend with some wine instead? I kept thinking, if only there were some kind of magic reset button, surely, I’d be able to do much better a second time around. I waited, climbed the four walls of my home, and waited more, but I couldn’t quit thinking about this dream of a magic reset button, and all the ways in which it could be used. In my brainstorming notebook, the sparkling kernel of a new idea slowly began to grow. And that’s how I ended up writing a novel that contained multiple paths. What if? Traditions * WHAT IF? All This and More is a roller coaster falls somewhere between a mystery and a thriller, with a healthy dose of science fiction and a dash of romance. All of us have had to face difficult choices or grapple with regret over things we wish had gone differently. But what if you actually could go back and fix your past mistakes? How would that change your life? And would it be worth what you’d have to give up? This is exactly what happens to Marsh, a woman full of regrets who wins a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a contestant on the mysterious game show “All This and More,” which as swept the world by storm with its miraculous promise: if you’re willing to accept the consequences that tampering with your past could bring, the show will literally change your present life. Marsh accepts without hesitation—but rewriting your past choices is never that simple. When glitches begin appearing in her perfectly crafted future, and she discovers evidence that someone or something may be trying to manipulate her fate at the same time, Marsh must decide just how far she’ll go to get her elusive happily ever after. But it doesn’t stop there. I really wanted readers to be able to not just read a novel about a person thrust into Marsh’s miraculous situation, but also to experience firsthand what they would change about their own pasts if they could, and consider what those changes might cost them. All This and More can be read straight through like a typical novel, but at certain points in the text, the book will give you the chance to help Marsh choose what she alters about her life—and you can decide whether to keep reading her story as it’s laid out or to change her path. Traditions The reader * EXCITEMENT Remember the joy of getting a new book from the library or bookstore, as a kid? A whole new adventure waiting for you to get lost in—probably you’d already dove into the first few pages in the car or on the bus before you even got home. Working on this book was like that for me, as the writer. Writing a novel is a very, very long game, and even on the best of days, the end of your manuscript seems very far away. It was an incredible challenge to build a premise that could support multiple versions of the same story, to weave them together into an organized web, and then allow you to be able to jump between the strands without losing your way. It kept me returning feverishly to the keyboard day after day, excited to push myself and the book—and maybe you, too—to its limits. Yes, an interactive fiction might ask a little more of its readers than a conventional book, but it’s worth it. They’re really able to really make you part of their story in a way that many other books can’t, and finding your way through it offers the same kind of fun as assembling a puzzle or solving a riddle. But in the case of my novel, there’s also the very meta aspect of having to make decisions for a character who’s been given the power to explore what her life would have been like if she’d made different choices. By choosing yourself, you have to declare what matters to you, both as a reader and as a person. And that’s exactly what All This and More is about. Nostalgia No Good Options * TRADITIONS All This and More is not the first of its kind for adults. One of the earliest novels with multiple paths is the 1930 Consider the Consequences by Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins, which let readers make decisions about the romantic life of a woman being courted by two suitors, and offered a staggering forty-three possible conclusions. There’s also Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar (published in 1963, translated into English in 1966), which allows the reader to freely jump between sections as they please; Neil Patrick Harris’s Choose Your Own Autobiography; Carmen Maria Machado’s absolutely chilling chapter about being trapped in an abusive relationship in her memoir In The Dream House; the fantastical, continent- and time-spanning Crossings by Alex Landragin; and many more. Several of our most modern forms of storytelling have embraced this branching path aspect as well. On television, Netflix’s recent Bandersnatch allowed viewers to push the troubled young man at the heart of a dark, surreal mystery to his limits, and video games have been asking players to make decisions for their characters and shape their destinies for years. No matter your age, there’s a whole world out there full of deep, complicated stories which ask you to go beyond passive reading—to more actively participate in the tale you’re enjoying. What if? The Reader * THE READER Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end. Having just finished reading an essay that allowed you to progress through it in multiple ways, hopefully you feel entertained, intrigued, or even hungry for more—but I will leave that up to you to decide. Through their stories, all books are trying to ask you a question. But a book that requires you to make choices to reach the end does not simply pose its question, but really implores you to answer it. Now, the only question left is, what will you read next? All This and More *** View the full article

More than two decades ago, the idea hit me. The kind of novel that I’d wanted to write, been trying to write for years, was equally influenced and informed by the early blues music I loved as it was by the hardboiled masters I idolized. I realized the direct connection between Hammett and Chandler and Son House and Robert Johnson. The spare poetry, sense of doom, and sudden violence crossed the page as surely as it came from my speakers. I knew if I could blend the two into a story, I really had something. All that time listening to Vocalion records and reading ragged old Dell paperbacks would finally pay off. Six months after my epiphany, I had finished a manuscript that became my first published novel, Crossroad Blues. I sold it almost immediately to St. Martin’s Press and haven’t slowed down since. The influence of music on my writing has never stopped, although it often changed styles and genres. For my second novel, I turned to the more polished Chicago blues style of the 1950s with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and the great Otis Rush. “I Can’t Quit You Baby (but have to put you down for a while)” was not only the historical backbeat of what became Leavin’ Trunk Blues, but also offered a tone and a feel that I wanted to bring to the novel. I listened to a lot of piano master Otis Spann, music filled with isolation and longing, to tell a story that stretched from the Mississippi Delta to the South Side of Chicago. I would start off each writing session listening to the specific era I was writing about, particularly drawn to the forgotten Cobra label where Otis Rush and Buddy Guy recorded their first singles. As I was drawn deeper into the world of noir fiction, I was also poring over the liner notes from those classic recordings. Cobra’s owner/producer had been murdered and the crime never solved. Harmonica virtuoso Little Walter had been beaten to death in an alley after a heated craps game. The music, historical backbeat, the hardboiled/noir voice all became one. My musical journey would take me to the heyday of Southern Soul at Stax Records in Memphis for Dark End of the Street. Another brilliant American music moment, also filled with darkness and crime. The book began in Memphis in 1968, with some of the story influenced by the true story of the unsolved murder of Booker T & the MGs’ drummer, Al Jackson. That took me to the blossoming Southern rap scene in New Orleans led by Master P, Mystikal, Juvenile and Lil’ Wayne for Dirty South. I started the novel with an epigraph of both Lil Wayne and Little Walter, two artists from the same city saying much the same thing, only in a different era and with different styles. The book, a violent noir set in New Orleans, is one of my favorites and stylistically and tonally very different from where I began with Crossroad Blues. All of these artists, from 100-year-old blues greats, to the soul masters, and Southern rappers from the early 2000s, taught me a hell of a lot about writing. I feel I learned as much from Willie Dixon or David Porter about crafting a scene and imagery as I did from Raymond Chandler or Elmore Leonard. The opening lyrics of Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle”—about a rogue’s gallery of killers and cutthroats meeting up for a party—was definitely a passage Dutch would’ve admired. Tell Automatic Slim, tell Razor Totin’ Jim . . . But while my appreciation and beginnings definitely started with American Black music, I leaned in heavy to the Cuban rhythms of Perez Prado and Beny Moré for my 1950s Florida crime epic, White Shadow. And the simple, elegant brilliance of my fellow Alabamian Hank Williams for Wicked City. Hank’s songs held a special place for me. A man deeply influenced by blues, he often parked his Cadillac across from my mother’s childhood home and drank Jack Daniel’s with my grandfather. (My mother recalls my grandfather coming home one night and talking about how Hank had another hit on his hands, beating out a drum beat on the dash of his car for a story about a wooden Indian chief named “Kaw-Liga.”) From the start of my eleven-book Quinn Colson series, I knew I wanted to create a character and a town that felt like a Johnny Cash song. That was the genesis of everything. The driving beat and blossoming threat of inescapable violence came of “Don’t take your guns to town, son” became The Ranger. Every book that followed echoed the heartbreak and darkness I heard in Waylon Jennings and Charley Pride. I think if I were to do a word search in my Quinn books, Charley Pride and Waylon would come up hundreds of times. Those artists were my warm-up music as I headed into Tibbehah County, rounding the curves of those country roads and heading on into the county seat of Jericho. I couldn’t write a scene without their influence. I think those winding roads in Mississippi, listening to classic country and blues, ultimately led me back to Memphis, where I am now with my 30th novel, Don’t Let the Devil Ride. I’ve been writing about Memphis—a place I feel is the epicenter of Americana—going back to my very first book. There are few, if any, Quinn books that don’t have scenes in the city, and my book Infamous is about the city’s most famous outlaw, George “Machine Gun” Kelly. For a long, long while I wanted to write an all-out Memphis story that wasn’t necessarily about music but felt like it had a true Memphis soundtrack. That included my favorite label, Stax (the subject of terrific new HBO documentary), and wonderful songs that came out of Royal Studios and Hi Records. I had the good fortune to spend some time with legendary producer Willie Mitchell some years ago. A gracious and gregarious man, he regaled me with tales of all the talent who’d recorded there. Ann Peebles. Syl Johnson. Otis Clay. All of this while he was waiting for Al Green to show up for his recording sessions, hours late. Some of his swagger and coolness absolutely shows up in Don’t Let the Devil Ride’s hero, Porter Hayes. Don’t Let the Devil Ride is peppered with a soundtrack of Memphis’s past—from Elvis to Otis. The hero of the novel, legendary private eye Porter Hayes, is named for the dynamic song writing team of David Porter and Isaac Hayes. Those two men were the heart of Stax, writing and producing such hits as “Soul Man,” “B-A-B-Y,” and “When Something is Wrong With My Baby” and too many others to list. But Porter Hayes’ connection to Stax goes far deeper than just his name. His energy, outlook and history is deeply tied to the Memphis label. He’s a Black man who came of age in the turbulent 1960s of Memphis, and as a young patrol officer, witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. His late wife Genevieve was a member of one of Stax’s most famous girl groups. My musical journey seemed to come full circle recently when David Porter showed up at one of my first book signings to buy a copy for himself and one for the late Isaac Hayes’ grandson. (His incredible appearance was facilitated by Memphis’s Live at 9 host Kontji Anthony, who had interviewed me earlier that day.) I was finally able to thank him for not only the enjoyment of all his hits but the inspiration he gave me as a writer. Without David Porter, there would be no Porter Hayes. Without the sound, the feel of Stax, Don’t Let the Devil Ride wouldn’t have a soul. It was a special moment for me as a writer. And we got to share a laugh when I told him about a pivotal moment in the novel. When Hayes’ client Addison McKellar is threatened by a one-armed mercenary, Porter Hayes gets to reply as only David Porter and Isaac Hayes could, “Hold On. I’m Comin’.” *** View the full article