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So your agent has finally found a sympathetic editor for your wondrously impatient manuscript? And they work at a major publishing house, imprint, or press. Now you think you're in tight? Whooo! Think again. The obstacle course has just begun. Your credentials and manuscript are facing the gauntlet of THE PUB BOARD! The what? A group of chair-bound editors and professional types at the press who down or up their thumbs for the stack of proposals sitting in front of them; and it varies from place to place, but more often than not, the pub board meets once a month. They include the specific editor who is a fan of your manuscript, of course, but what about other players and professions? Let's back up for a second. Pre-pub board editorial meetings can occur for the purpose of winnowing forth the absolute best proposals, thereby giving the editors a running start before sales and marketing weigh in to potentially cast doubts. And let's face it, if this group of editors don't see sufficient potential in the proposal (novel) despite the devotion of your new fan editor, your future career with this organization stops there. The Pub Board will never see it. We can verge off here into the politics of human organization, but that's a subject for your social-psyche class, or some derivation thereof. Now back to the working parts of the Pub Board. Traditional publishers will send reps from the Sales and Marketing departments to Pub Board meetings. The sales types focus on sales to major bookstores and chains like Barnes & Noble. Their jobs are on the line, like everyone else's. What if they get it wrong and a thumbs up results in a first novel that sputters to dust on the shelf? How much dust can collect before feeding the tropical fish becomes a daily pursuit? Where do the fingers point after the thumbs go wrong? In contrast, the marketing types are focused on selling the proposed novel directly to the reader. Among other things, they examine the author's platform. Is it good enough? Do they have 5,650,876 followers on social media? No? Does sales believe the bookstores might wish to stock the novel? Well, too bad. The platform isn't good enough. The thumb goes down. And like the sales type, the marketing type foresees a future of feeding the fish if too many poor decisions are made. So what does this mean in terms of fight-vs-flight decision-making? It's much easier to be negative and wax positive only when it feels like there is sufficient support and enthusiasm all around the room, and that way, you see, if things go south later on when the book flops, the fingers will point everywhere, or perhaps, not point at all. Consider, how many humans are willing to accept responsibility when their jobs are on the line? So as you might surmise, Sales and Marketing thump the heaviest fists at the table.They can be expert or inexpert, experienced or green as ivy, whatever, it does not matter. If they get fidgety over the prospect of success, gravity rules the thumb. And don't forget Accounting! Accounting figures the cost of book production, and they'll crunch the numbers on you.The more pages your novel has, the more expensive to produce. Aside from pages, the accounting types might argue that an especially fancy cover will work hard to cause the novel to remain in the red. Then guess what happens? You must keep in mind that Pub Board politics and dialogue fail to take into account such vital and earth-moving novel elements as plot, characters, and theme. I wonder why? Does anyone know? ________________________________ [url={url}]View the full article[/url]

One more time!

Very Important Questions to Ask Yourself So you're searching high and low for a decent and experienced freelancer to read your novel ms and provide it with the healing touch it needs. You most likely will require thorough developmental editing, not to mention narrative or sample line edits at a minimum. Okay. So where to go? There are Google pages full of poor editorial services out there and just about anyone can claim to be a novel editor. Therefore, how to winnow forth the quality expertise you must have? Below are a few questions to ask yourself before engaging any editorial service: Do you get to review the credentials of the precise person who will be working on your ms? Do the credentials include any real-time experience working in tandem with New York publishing or mid-sized publishers or quality independent presses at least? Is there a demonstrable track record of commercial or literary publication of any kind associated with past clients of this particular person or service? Is the proposed editor of your ms an actual writer of fiction, narrative nonfiction, or novels with a track record of any kind? (self-publishing not included) Do the accolades or testimonials about the business or editor appear to include a lot of buzz phrasing rather than pointers to actual contracts? Be careful out there!

Introduction to Pre-event Assignments The below seven assignments are vital to reaching an understanding of specific and critical core elements that go into the creation of a commercially viable genre novel or narrative non-fiction. Of course, there is more to it than this, as you will see, but here we have a good primer that assures we're literally all on the same page before the event begins. You may return here as many times as you need to edit your topic post (login and click "edit"). Pay special attention to antagonists, setting, conflict and core wound hooks. And btw, quiet novels do not sell. Keep that in mind and be aggressive with your work. Michael Neff Algonkian Conference Director ____________ After you've registered and logged in, create your reply to this topic (button top right). Please utilize only one reply for all of your responses so the forum topic will not become cluttered. Also, strongly suggest typing up your "reply" in a separate file then copying it over to your post before submitting. Not a good idea to lose what you've done! __________________________________________________________ THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT Before you begin to consider or rewrite your story premise, you must develop a simple "story statement." In other words, what's the mission of your protagonist? The goal? What must be done? What must this person create? Save? Restore? Accomplish? Defeat?... Defy the dictator of the city and her bury brother’s body (ANTIGONE)? Struggle for control over the asylum (ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST)? Do whatever it takes to recover lost love (THE GREAT GATSBY)? Save the farm and live to tell the story (COLD MOUNTAIN)? Find the wizard and a way home to Kansas (WIZARD OF OZ)? Note that all of these are books with strong antagonists who drive the plot line (see also "Core Wounds and Conflict Lines" below). FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement. ___________________________________________________ THE ANTAGONIST PLOTS THE POINT (Photo : Javert from "Les Misérables") What are the odds of you having your manuscript published if the overall story and narrative fail to meet publisher demands for sufficient suspense, character concern, and conflict? Answer: none. You might therefore ask, what major factor makes for a quiet and dull manuscript brimming with insipid characters and a story that cascades from chapter to chapter with tens of thousands of words, all of them combining irresistibly to produce an audible thudding sound in the mind like a mallet hitting a side of cold beef? Answer: the unwillingness or inability of the writer to create a suitable antagonist who stirs and spices the plot hash. Let's make it clear what we're talking about. By "antagonist" we specifically refer to an actual fictional character, an embodiment of certain traits and motivations who plays a significant role in catalyzing and energizing plot line(s), or at bare minimum, in assisting to evolve the protagonist's character arc (and by default the story itself) by igniting complication(s) the protagonist, and possibly other characters, must face and solve (or fail to solve). CONTINUE READING ENTIRE ARTICLE AT NWOE THEN RETURN HERE. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them. ___________________________________________________ CONJURING YOUR BREAKOUT TITLE What is your breakout title? How important is a great title before you even become published? Very important! Quite often, agents and editors will get a feel for a work and even sense the marketing potential just from a title. A title has the ability to attract and condition the reader's attention. It can be magical or thud like a bag of wet chalk, so choose carefully. A poor title sends the clear message that what comes after will also be of poor quality. Go to Amazon.Com and research a good share of titles in your genre, come up with options, write them down and let them simmer for at least 24 hours. Consider character or place names, settings, or a "label" that describes a major character, like THE ENGLISH PATIENT or THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST. Consider also images, objects, or metaphors in the novel that might help create a title, or perhaps a quotation from another source (poetry, the Bible, etc.) that thematically represents your story. Or how about a title that summarizes the whole story: THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, etc. Keep in mind that the difference between a mediocre title and a great title is the difference between THE DEAD GIRL'S SKELETON and THE LOVELY BONES, between TIME TO LOVE THAT CHOLERA and LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA between STRANGERS FROM WITHIN (Golding's original title) and LORD OF THE FLIES, between BEING LIGHT AND UNBEARABLE and THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: create a breakout title (list several options, not more than three, and revisit to edit as needed). ___________________________________________________ DECIDING YOUR GENRE AND APPROACHING COMPARABLES Did you know that a high percentage of new novel writers don't fully understand their genre, much less comprehend comparables? When informing professionals about the nuances of your novel, whether by query letter or oral pitch, you must know your genre first, and provide smart comparables second. In other words, you need to transcend just a simple statement of genre (literary, mystery, thriller, romance, science fiction, etc.) by identifying and relating your novel more specifically to each publisher's or agent's area of expertise, and you accomplish this by wisely comparing your novel to contemporary published novels they will most likely recognize and appreciate--and it usually doesn't take more than two good comps to make your point. Agents and publishing house editors always want to know the comps. There is more than one reason for this. First, it helps them understand your readership, and thus how to position your work for the market. Secondly, it demonstrates up front that you are a professional who understands your contemporary market, not just the classics. Very important! And finally, it serves as a tool to enable them to pitch your novel to the decision-makers in the business. Most likely you will need to research your comps. If you're not sure how to begin, go to Amazon.Com, type in the title of a novel you believe very similar to yours, choose it, then scroll down the page to see Amazon's list of "Readers Also Bought This" and begin your search that way. Keep in mind that before you begin, you should know enough about your own novel to make the comparison in the first place! By the way, beware of using comparables by overly popular and classic authors. If you compare your work to classic authors like H.G. Wells and Gabriel Marquez in the same breath you will risk being declared insane. If you compare your work to huge contemporary authors like Nick Hornby or Jodi Picoult or Nora Ephron or Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling, and so forth, you will not be laughed at, but you will also not be taken seriously since thousands of others compare their work to the same writers. Best to use two rising stars in your genre. If you can't do this, use only one classic or popular author and combine with a rising star. Choose carefully! FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: - Read this NWOE article on comparables then return here. - Develop two smart comparables for your novel. This is a good opportunity to immerse yourself in your chosen genre. Who compares to you? And why? ____________________________________________________ CORE WOUND AND THE PRIMARY CONFLICT Conflict, tension, complication, drama--all basically related, and all going a long way to keeping the reader's eyes fixated on your story. These days, serving up a big manuscript of quiet is a sure path to damnation. You need tension on the page at all times, and the best way to accomplish this is to create conflict and complications in the plot and narrative. Consider "conflict" divided into three parts, all of which you MUST have present in the novel. First part, the primary dramatic conflict which drives through the work from beginning to end, from first major plot point to final reversal, and finally resolving with an important climax. Next, secondary conflicts or complications that take various social forms - anything from a vigorous love subplot to family issues to turmoil with fellow characters. Finally, those various inner conflicts and core wounds all important characters must endure and resolve as the story moves forward. But now, back to the PRIMARY DRAMATIC CONFLICT. If you've taken care to consider your story description and your hook line, you should be able to identify your main conflict(s). Let's look at some basic information regarding the history of conflict in storytelling. Conflict was first described in ancient Greek literature as the agon, or central contest in tragedy. According to Aristotle, in order to hold the interest, the hero must have a single conflict. The agon, or act of conflict, involves the protagonist (the "first fighter" or "hero") and the antagonist corresponding to the villain (whatever form that takes). The outcome of the contest cannot be known in advance, and, according to later drama critics such as Plutarch, the hero's struggle should be ennobling. Is that always true these days? Not always, but let's move on. Even in contemporary, non-dramatic literature, critics have observed that the agon is the central unit of the plot. The easier it is for the protagonist to triumph, the less value there is in the drama. In internal and external conflict alike, the antagonist must act upon the protagonist and must seem at first to overmatch him or her. The above defines classic drama that creates conflict with real stakes. You see it everywhere, to one degree or another, from classic contemporary westerns like THE SAVAGE BREED to a time-tested novel as literary as THE GREAT GATSBY. And of course, you need to have conflict or complications in nonfiction also, in some form, or you have a story that is too quiet. For examples let's return to the story descriptions and create some HOOK LINES. Let's don't forget to consider the "core wound" of the protagonist. Please read this article at NWOE then return here. The Hand of Fatima by Ildefonso Falcones A young Moor torn between Islam and Christianity, scorned and tormented by both, struggles to bridge the two faiths by seeking common ground in the very nature of God. Summer's Sisters by Judy Blume After sharing a magical summer with a friend, a young woman must confront her friend's betrayal of her with the man she loved. The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud As an apprentice mage seeks revenge on an elder magician who humiliated him, he unleashes a powerful Djinn who joins the mage to confront a danger that threatens their entire world. Note that it is fairly easy to ascertain the stakes in each case above: a young woman's love and friendship, the entire world, and harmony between opposed religions. If you cannot make the stakes clear, the odds are you don't have any. Also, is the core wound obvious or implied? FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound following the format above. Though you may not have one now, keep in mind this is a great developmental tool. In other words, you best begin focusing on this if you're serious about commercial publication. ______________________________________________________ OTHER MATTERS OF CONFLICT: TWO MORE LEVELS As noted above, consider "conflict" divided into three parts, all of which you should ideally have present. First, the primary conflict which drives through the core of the work from beginning to end and which zeniths with an important climax (falling action and denouement to follow). Next, secondary conflicts or complications which can take various social forms (anything from a vigorous love subplot to family issues to turmoil with fellow characters). Finally, those inner conflicts the major characters must endure and resolve. You must note the inner personal conflicts elsewhere in this profile, but make certain to note any important interpersonal conflicts within this particular category." SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction. Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. Will this involve family? Friends? Associates? What is the nature of it? ______________________________________________________ THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING When considering your novel, whether taking place in a contemporary urban world or on a distant magical planet in Andromeda, you must first sketch the best overall setting and sub-settings for your story. Consider: the more unique and intriguing (or quirky) your setting, the more easily you're able to create energetic scenes, narrative, and overall story. A great setting maximizes opportunities for interesting characters, circumstances, and complications, and therefore makes your writing life so much easier. Imagination is truly your best friend when it comes to writing competitive fiction, and nothing provides a stronger foundation than a great setting. One of the best selling contemporary novels, THE HUNGER GAMES, is driven by the circumstances of the setting, and the characters are a product of that unique environment, the plot also. But even if you're not writing SF/F, the choice of setting is just as important, perhaps even more so. If you must place your upmarket story in a sleepy little town in Maine winter, then choose a setting within that town that maximizes opportunities for verve and conflict, for example, a bed and breakfast stocked to the ceiling with odd characters who combine to create comical, suspenseful, dangerous or difficult complications or subplot reversals that the bewildered and sympathetic protagonist must endure and resolve while he or she is perhaps engaged in a bigger plot line: restarting an old love affair, reuniting with a family member, starting a new business, etc. And don't forget that non-gratuitous sex goes a long way, especially for American readers. CONTINUE TO READ THIS ARTICLE THEN RETURN. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail. What makes it interesting enough, scene by scene, to allow for uniqueness and cinema in your narrative and story? Please don't simply repeat what you already have which may well be too quiet. You can change it. That's why you're here! Start now. Imagination is your best friend, and be aggressive with it. ________________________ Below are several links to part of an article or whole articles that we feel are the most valuable for memoir writers. We have reviewed these and agree 110%. MEMOIR WRITING - CHOOSE A SPECIFIC EVENT (good general primer) How to Write a Memoir That People Care About | NY Book Editors NYBOOKEDITORS.COM Are you thinking of writing a memoir but you're stuck? We've got the remedy. Check out our beginner's guide on writing an epic and engaging memoir. MEMOIR MUST INCLUDE TRANSCENDENCE Writing Memoir? Include Transcendence - Memoir coach and author Marion Roach MARIONROACH.COM MEMOIR REQUIRES TRANSCENDENCE. Something has to happen. Or shift. Someone has to change a little. Or grow. It’s the bare hack minimum of memoir. WRITE IT LIKE A NOVEL How to Write a Powerful Memoir in 5 Simple Steps JERRYJENKINS.COM When it comes to writing a memoir, there are 5 things you need to focus on. If you do, your powerful story will have the best chance of impacting others. MEMOIR ANECDOTES - HOW TO MAKE THEM SHINE How to Write an Anecdote That Makes Your Nonfiction Come Alive JERRYJENKINS.COM Knowing how to write an anecdote lets you utilize the power of story with your nonfiction and engage your reader from the first page. ________________________

Since you asked... Nearly everyone has the potential to write a breakout novel and go on to become a successful commercial author, but precious few finally accomplish the task. Do we know why this is the rule? Writer conferences, author workshops, books, ms editors, and even the most pointless of MFA programs play a part in a writer's evolution, but none of these provide the overall pragmatic means and method to finish the job (and quite often, not even to start it). If this were not the case, an imaginative and ambitious writer would only have to attend an MFA program at Iowa, for example, and become a published author in due course. But this rarely if ever happens, despite expenditures in the range of $30,000 to $80,000 (Iowa Grad Program for two full years). Aside from this lack of comprehensive and realistic training, many other factors come into play that hamper the aspiring commercial author, everything from prickly skin to incompetent writer groups to misunderstandings of market dynamics. Consider. Would you try to build a livable and quite stylish home on your own without an architect and a professional home builder simply because you had the ability to hammer a few boards together with nails? Of course not. You would acquire the expertise and skills before you began. And yet, new writers approach the creation of a thing equally or more complex, such as the writing of a competitive commercial novel, in the belief they can do so because they have a story idea, can type words on a page, and have read a few magazines about writing. They consult with other new writers as ignorant as themselves and proceed to build a house called a novel, but one that will not risk their lives because fortunately for them, it is all on paper. So what to do? Ditch your writer's group, utilize the forums found here in every way possible, move on to a good novel development workshop, draft the novel at least three times, then have the first 100 pages (at least) read by a professional with editorial experience. Once done, you might well be prepared to write a publishable novel.

Even if the temperatures are still high, the start of the school year and the first wave of Christmas promotional gift guide emails have combined forces to indicate that fall has now arrived (I’m not kidding about those gift guide emails. They start early). No matter that the brown leaves poetically falling from the branches were killed by the heat waves…They are still falling! And while I’m talking about the cycle of life, disrupted or otherwise—time to recommend some murderous fiction. Below, you’ll find a host of horror, a smorgasbord of psychologicals, a murmuration of mysteries, and a cabal of crime novels…Or, to put it more succinctly: 75+ books, all very good, and all coming out before the end of the year. Enjoy! ___________________________________ SEPTEMBER ___________________________________ Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (Hogarth) Angie Kim once again combines an intense character study with a searching mystery, this time after her narrator’s husband disappears, and police are interested in quickly pinning it on her nonverbal son. Kim uses the parallel investigations of police and family to explore the complex dynamics of interracial marriage, Asian and biracial identity in America, and the nuances of raising a child with special needs. You’ll want to savor every word as Kim plunges the depths of human action and finds love at the center. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Managing Editor Lou Berney, Dark Ride (William Morrow) Berney’s new novel, Dark Ride, introduces readers to an immediately unforgettable character: Hardly Reed, a twenty-one year old stoner working at an amusement park, breezing through life’s various travails when he comes across a pair of kids he suspects of being abused. When Hardly, against all odds and his own inclinations, decides to get involved and try to help the kids, he soon finds himself pitted against a local lawyer who’s also at the helm of a dangerous drug trafficking operation. Berney brings a compelling human touch to a story that grabs hold of the reader early and never lets go. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief William Kent Krueger, The River We Remember (Atria) Krueger delivers another powerful standalone, this one about a small Minnesota town, a prominent citizen murdered, and the traumas of war that still haunt so many in this little pocket of America. Krueger writes, as ever, with deep empathy and impeccable suspense. –DM Eliza Clark, Penance (Harper) Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts stunned me with its grotesque grand guignol violence and reversal of the male gaze, and Penance is just as good, although somewhat kinder to its characters. Penance is a take on the infamous Slenderman case (a real-life case linked to the undiagnosed schizophrenia of one attempted murderer and the folie a deux madness that gripped both her and her friend), but with different motivations for the killers. When three high school girls murder their rival, the world is quick to condemn them for their monstrosity, but as we read the novel, we see that they are monsters made, not monsters born. Of particular note is a scene in which one traumatized character tortures her Sims. I then went down a rabbit hole of how people torture their Sims and…wow. –MO Carissa Orlando, The September House (Berkley) Carissa Orlando’s The September House uses hauntings as a brilliant metaphor for abuse, and what people can get used to, as well as a prescient comment on the tight housing market. Orlando’s narrator loves her home, and if she needs to ignore some ghostly children, be served tea by a taciturn housekeeper with a gaping face wound, and scrub the blood off the walls once a season, then so be it. Her husband isn’t so good at tolerating the house, but then, she’s learned how to tolerate much more from his treatment of her than she ever expected. When her daughter comes to stay, and her husband goes missing, it’s up to Orlando to continue saying “everything’s fine” for far too long. But the ghost in the basement may finally spur her to action…I found myself cheering at the end of this book, and I really hope it gets picked up as a Ryan Murphy production (post-writers’ strike, that is). –MO Ariel Dorfman, The Suicide Museum (Other Press) An unusual duo—a wealthy Holocaust survivor and a struggling writer—team up to understand the 1973 death of the Chilean president in this wide-ranging novel that’s both complex investigation and emotional history. Ariel Dorfman is best known as the author of Death and the Maiden, and The Suicide Museum once again uses a mixture of fact and fiction to process the trauma of Chile’s dictatorship. –MO Adam Mansbach, The Golem of Brooklyn (Random House) An art teacher makes a golem. The golem is very confused. Why is he back? What dangers are the Jewish people facing? Why did G-d allow such an idiot to bring him life? And where is his penis? Luckily Miri, the Yiddish-speaking ex-Hasid clerk at the corner store, is ready to help them out, as is his weed dealer, Waleed, and a host of other colorful neighborhood characters, including a bodega cat. What follows is a picaresque misadventure, a dive into Jewish history, and a warning about the American present. If you want more golems, Aden Polydoros has a novel coming out in October called Wrath Becomes Her: a teenage girl is killed in the Holocaust and brought back as a clay creature, seeking vengeance. –MO Alicia Elliott, And Then She Fell (Dutton) A young indigenous woman is going stir-crazy at home after giving birth, and her husband, a white professor of Native American studies, seems so supportive. But her husband keeps succeeding at her expense, the neighbors are beyond suspicious, her impostor syndrome is overwhelming, and it’s up to Elliott’s heroine to listen to the warnings of her ancestors and find the key to survival in the Haudenosaunee creation story. Creepy, thoughtful, and immersive! –MO Juan Cárdenas, The Devil of the Provinces Translated by Lizzie Davis (Coffee House) A strange, meditative work, The Devil in the Provinces follows a biologist back to his hometown in Colombia as he looks after his mother and is drawn into the mysteries surrounding his brother’s murder. The novel balances a compelling crime story with a willingness to delve into the unexplained phenomena of a life coming untethered. –DM James Ellroy, The Enchanters (Knopf) Ellroy’s latest is another dark odyssey through the midcentury Los Angeles underbelly, this time with his hopelessly corrupt cops and fixers digging around the death of Marilyn Monroe: in part to solve the mystery, and in even larger part to make some money for themselves. Ellroy is, as ever, the bard of sullied Angelenos. –DM Tod Goldberg, Gangsters Don’t Die (Counterpoint) Goldberg’s Gangsterland series has been one of the standouts in the world of crime fiction in recent years, and now the trilogy is coming to a conclusion with the publication of Gangsters Don’t Die. Sal Cupertino, the hit man on the lam, posing as a rabbi, is one of the more original figures you’ll come across, and now he’s making one last desperate gambit to get his life back. You won’t want to miss these books, so if you haven’t already, brush up on your Goldberg. –DM Tomi Oyemakinde, The Changing Man (Feiwel & Friends) Get Out meets Ace of Spades in this boarding-school horror. A young scholarship student at an elite academy notices some of her classmates of color have been exhibiting remarkable, and unnatural, changes in behavior. What does the school want? And what is it willing to take? An excellent horror thriller that you’ll speed through in less than a day. –MO John Manuel Arias, Where There Was Fire (Flatiron) In 1968 Costa Rica, a fruit plantation burns after a family argument. Decades later, the family is still riven by their secrets. What caused the fire? What happened to the family’s patriarch? And what truths will characters learn about themselves, trapped with their thoughts and unpredictable company during an epic hurricane? –MO Lisa Springer, There’s No Way I’d Die First (Delacorte Press) Influencers! Halloween games! And a KILLER CLOWN!!!! There’s no way the narrator won’t make it to the end of this book, with all her Final Girl brilliance, which means there’s no way that you, the reader, will not also make it to the end of the very fun, very campy slasher novel. Springer’s heroine is trying to get attention for her horror film club and invites her prep school’s most influential students to an exclusive Halloween party at her parent’s mansion. Unfortunately, the party entertainment she’s hired has their own agenda, and it’ll take all her knowledge of horror tropes and household chemistry to outwit the clown’s righteous fury and grotesque gags. –MO Laura Picklesimer, Kill For Love (Unnamed Press) The bored college fifth-year narrating Kill For Love has always been good at suppressing her appetites—you can see it in her carefully counted calories, svelte figure, and attempts to mask her sociopathy from her sisters. But when she kills a man in the act of coitus one night—then devours a meal of greasy meat for the first time in years—she realizes she’s found the one hunger impossible to ignore. Of particular note is how Picklesimer’s language reverses the male gaze as her killer objectifies the frat bros around her and tries to keep from mauling their drunken flesh. –MO Adam Sass, Your Lonely Nights Are Over (Viking Young Readers) In this delightful YA homage to the slasher, a serial killer is targeting a school’s queer club, and two besties find themselves ostracized from the club after suspicion falls on them for the murders. They must clear their names, in between going to drive-in movies, settling scores, and occasionally hooking up. Will they solve the murders? Will they end up together? Do I even care who the murderer is when I’m desperate for these two to smash? Anyway, file this one under, Very Fun and Not at All Scary (at least, compared to other slashers). –MO Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Square of Sevens (Atria) In this lush gothic, a young girl who knows the art of predicting fortunes becomes ward to a kind intellectual, who raises her in safety and anonymity in 18th-century Bath. As she grows into a poised young woman, she finds herself increasingly curious about her fairy-tale origins, in which her fortune-teller father ran away with her aristocratic mother. When a chance comes to know more of her history, she takes it, even as a larger conspiracy threatens her found family. –MO Clay McLeod Chapman, What Kind of Mother (Quirk) I was shattered by Clay McLeod Chapman’s grief horror Ghost Eaters, and in What Kind of Mother, Chapman revisits some of the same themes of loss and absence, this time in the guise of a domestic thriller with supernatural overtones. A palm reader heads back to her hometown with her teenage daughter, only to reconnect with an old flame who is struggling with the loss of his young son. After reading his palm, Chapman’s heroine finds herself convinced her lover’s son is still alive. But where could he be, and who could have taken him? –MO Kaori Fujino, Nails and Eyes Translated by Kendall Heitzman (Pushkin Press) I’m so looking forward to reading this literary Japanese horror that has earned comparisons to The Vegetarian and Tender is the Flesh (hint, hint). Narrated by a young girl with sinister intentions toward her stepmother, Nails and Eyes is a taught and entrancing novella, with additional disturbing stories rounding out the page count, all feeling very 90s-era Tartan video. The volume is part of a new series of Japanese short classics being issued by Pushkin Press, known on CrimeReads for their excellent Pushkin Vertigo series of classic detective fiction. –MO Rachel Harrison, Black Sheep (Berkley) It’s hard coming home to your estranged family to celebrate the wedding of your ex to your childhood best friend. It’s even harder when your family, your ex’s family, and your best friend are all part of an insular Satanist cult. And when Satan himself decides to show up at the celebration, well, that’s when all hell breaks loose (get it?). An excellent addition to the “weddings-gone-awry” genre, and just as funny as it is creepy. –MO Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria (Astra House) A badass Guatemalan grandma battles her way across a disaster-fallen city to find her granddaughters, fighting otherworldly creatures and strangely fixated on reaching the Watertown Mall Old Country Buffet. I’m psyched to read this bizarre, Lovecraftian take on disaster fiction. –MO Anise Vance, Hush Harbor (Hanover Square) Hush Harbor is an epic novel of utopian hope in a dystopian world. When another Black teenager dies at the hands of the police, an armed self-defense movement establishes an intentional community in an abandoned housing project in New Jersey. How far will the revolution be able to go, before the unjust status quo is imposed on them? I loved this book’s pragmatic take on revolution and occupation, and kind approach to collective movements. Anise Vance demonstrates the thin line between utopian, dystopian, and thriller, in this genre-bending novel of ideas and action. –MO Sheena Patel, I’m a Fan (Graywolf) In this deliciously creepy British novel, a woman becomes obsessed with the influencer who is sleeping with her lover. What follows is an intense meditation on status, social media, and discontent. Also, check out that cover design! –MO Dan Frey, Dreambound (Del Rey) The real world and a fantastical one created by an author living in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills begin to bleed into one another in Dan Frey’s wild, genre-hopping ride, Dreambound. A dogged reporter is on the trail of his daughter, who’s gone missing, along with a string of children, and the trail soon suggests a crossing over of worlds, between the real and the presumed imaginary. Frey creates a fascinating mystery equal parts wondrous and terrifying. –DM Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die (Pamela Dorman) REJOICE, for the new Thursday Murder Club book has arrived!! (Actually, I should have said RE-JOYCE). I know I say every time how I’m so excited and “this one” is going the best but I mean it every time, and I mean it now. The Last Devil to Die is a delightful romp taking our four protagonists deep into the worlds of drug dealing, art forgery, and, worst of all, the antiques industry. I’ve been waiting for this book for a whole year and it didn’t let me down. I just wish, as with every installment of the Thursday Murder Club series, that it were about a thousand pages longer. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Associate Editor ___________________________________ OCTOBER ___________________________________ Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women (S&S/MarySue Rucci) Jessica Knoll is a careful writer, and this, her third novel, is a perfect match for her cold dissection of social mores and her fierce rage at misogyny. Knoll takes on the story of Ted Bundy, told from the perspective of a student who survives a horrific attack on a sorority house. She then must fight to preserve her sisters’ dignity and get the truths of their last moments as the world around them fetishizes their killer and attempts to make jokes of their deaths. Some may claim that the crime genre is rift with misogyny; those people have not read Jessica Knoll. She tears apart the restrictive world of women’s roles and lays bare the purpose of such hobbles: to keep women from making a scene, to keep them from seeking justice, and most of all, to keep them from seeking their own lives. –MO Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn Crime Novel (Ecco) Lethem’s return to the Brooklyn crime novel brings a wild, exuberant ambition that pays off and delivers to readers a true achievement: a book at once full of art and grace and mystery. The book’s backward-looking gaze takes up a half-century of history in one neighborhood, as we see the porous borders between what’s remembered and what was, with criminals and hustles providing all the misdirection needed for a truly astonishing effect. Lethem proves again why he is a master of the form. –DM Marie NDiaye, Vengeance Is Mine Translated by Jordan Stump (Astra House) In Marie NDiaye’s sinister and spellbinding new novel, a lawyer is hired by the husband of a woman accused of murdering her three children, despite her lack of experience in high-profile trials. Meeting him unlocks memories for her of a childhood visit to a palatial home, perhaps occupied by the husband’s family, and wonders if she perhaps met her new client when she was 10 and he was 15. But what happened between them? And why can’t she remember the details? Half suspense novel, half dark fairy tale, Vengeance is Mine is a literary tour-de-force. –MO Ashley Winstead, Midnight is the Darkest Hour (Sourcebooks) Ashley Winstead’s new novel is a darkly romantic gothic tale of a swampy Southern town with too many bad men and too much fear of the devil. A preacher’s daughter and her best friend once covered up a crime, and now it threatens their precious, hard-won freedom from the oppressive mores and pervasive hypocrisy of their small town. What secrets will come to light as the investigation progresses? And who will cast the first stone of retribution? Winstead’s spellbinding prose ensnares the reader just as much as the eerie setting and driving suspense. –MO Jean Kwok, The Leftover Woman (William Morrow) Jean Kwok established herself as a writer to watch with her stunning debut, Searching for Sylvie Lee, and her upcoming novel is just as emotional, beautiful, and haunting. A young woman leaves China and heads to America to search for her daughter, stolen by her husband as a newborn and trafficked to America for international adoption. Meanwhile, an editor struggles with motherhood and finds herself feeling shamed by the love her adopted daughter has for their nanny. Kwok has woven an impeccably plotted domestic thriller that culminates in a profoundly satisfying ending, and I must insist that everyone pick this one up. –MO Raul Palma, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton) Palma’s debut is a sparkling gem of a novel, a world-weary portrait of cynicism and despair upended and upended again. A recent widower in Miami with an indefatigable debt collector on his trail gets a bizarre offer from his antagonist: cleanse his house of unwanted spirits, and the debt will be forgiven. The trouble is, our man, though with a certain expertise, doesn’t actually believe in the spirits himself, and so undertakes an elaborate con job instead. Palma writes with precision and wit, bringing out a story that’s genuinely compelling and insightful. –DM Hannah Morrissey, When I’m Dead (Minotaur) When I’m Dead is bone-chilling. Not just because it takes place in October, but because it’s about a mom (and medical examiner) who discovers that her daughter’s best friend is dead… right before she discovers that her own daughter is missing. Read it while hugging a pillow to your chest. –OR Yomi Adegoke, The List (William Morrow) Yomi Adegoke’s debut thriller is sophisticated, complex, and smart, posing an uneasy question: what would you do if your partner was accused of a heinous act? And how would you go about finding out the truth? The List follows Ola and Michael, two Black British professionals whose status as #couplegoals is threatened by shocking (and anonymous) revelations about Michael’s behavior towards another woman. –MO Juli Zeh, About People Translated by Alta L. Price (World Editions) At the peak of the pandemic, a woman splits with her boyfriend over his increasingly rigid commitment to environmentalism and heads to the German countryside. The new home needs unexpected work, she and her dog promptly clash with their menacing neighbor, and unexplained things are happening all around her. This literary thriller is an intense exploration of fear and isolation. –MO Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers (Catapult) The Berry Pickers is a sensitive and devastating saga of families broken, children stolen, and fierce reckonings with the traumas of history. As the novel begins, a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq child goes missing, her disappearance sending her loved ones into their own private hells. We’re then introduced to a girl growing up with a paranoid mother and an aloof father, dreaming of another family and wondering at her parents’ reticence when it comes to her earliest years. The novel starts in 1962 and spans over 50 years, with an emotional climax that will leave most readers with at least a tear in their eye. –MO Adriana Chartrand, An Ordinary Violence (Spiderline) In An Ordinary Violence, a young Indigenous woman who is living in Toronto, reckoning with the violence and trauma of her past, receives uncanny messages and soon goes back home looking for answers. Her story is offset against her brother’s, recently released from jail and mixed up with something supernatural. Chartrand weaves together an unsettling tale that interrogates cross-generational pain. –DM Tananarive Due, The Reformatory (Saga) Tananarive Due is one of the greatest living horror writers, and her new book blends her signature style with an exploration into a very personal trauma: Due’s great-uncle was one of many Black children harmed by the Florida reform school known as the Dozier School for Boys, and The Reformatory takes readers into the nightmare that was the school circa 1950. Sure to be as powerful as it is haunting. –MO Gustavo Eduardo Abrevaya, The Sanctuary Translated by Andrea G. Labinger (Schaffner Press) In what reads as a David Lynch take on Red Harvest, a couple is on their way to a remote cabin when their car breaks down, stranding them in the middle of nowhere. In a quest to find assistance, they find themselves in a sinister village ruled by a despotic mayor, a fire-and-brimstone priest, an insidious, lewd, police squad, and more strange denizens. Soon, the wife goes missing. None of the townspeople are interested in finding her. And her husband must search far and wide for any allies… –MO Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill (Mulholland) Elizabeth Hand is one of the coolest writers around, and I’m psyched to dive into A Haunting on the Hill, a Shirley-Jackson-estate approved continuation of The Haunting of Hill House (This time with more hauntings! And more hills! Actually probably just the one hill). Playwright Holly Sherwin and her girlfriend Nisa head upstate with a troupe of actors to stage and rehearse a new play. Sherwin is confident that the crumbling gothic manor of Hill House will bring out their creative sides, but instead, they are joined by their hauntings. I love a play-gone-wrong story and Hand’s promises to be one of the best. –MO Helen Garner, This House of Grief (Pantheon) In this gorgeous reckoning with a shocking crime, Helen Garner recounts the trial of a man accused of murdering his three children by driving them into a dam. Garner attended the trial as a journalist, and her keen observations of not only the defendant but everyone in the courtroom elevate this to the highest levels of literary craft, even as the words she writes remain painfully, horrifically true. –MO Jo Nesbø, The Night House Translated by Neil Smith (Knopf) Jo Nesbo’s upcoming horror novel is a delightful contrast with the author’s usual work; in The Night House, classic horror tropes are reinvented as an unreliable narrator tries to block out terrible, knowing voices. One by one, his schoolmates begin to vanish, and he’s quickly pegged as the suspicious, angry outsider who must be behind the killings. Will he lose the girl he loves next? And is he, perhaps, the real danger? There are some wickedly clever reveals that I will not talk about here but you must read this book so you, too, can be properly surprised. –MO Sam Rebelein, Edenville (William Morrow) A novelist has a very vivid dream. He wakes up and writes a novel. That novel comes across the desk of a mysterious researcher who curses her discovery. She doesn’t want to kill the author—perhaps, she can hire him as an adjunct creative writing teacher instead? And so the author and his girlfriend head to a small liberal arts college where the English department has a strangely otherworldly agenda. This book was a wild ride from start to finish, with a heavy dose of humor thrown into the mix. –MO Caitlin Starling, Last to Leave the Room (St. Martin’s) A scientist is performing dangerous experiments deep inside the earth that appear to be warping the very geography of her city. Meanwhile, her basement keeps getting deeper….and deeper…until one day, a door appears where there was once a blank wall. On the other side of the door is the scientist’s doppelgänger, and her perfect complement—cheerful when she is morose, friendly when she needs solitude. This book has brought me a delicious sense of unease, and Starling’s signature intricate world-building is once again on full display. –MO Anna Biller, Bluebeard’s Castle (Verso) Anna Biller’s sly feminist dissection of gothic tropes is as lush and layered as her cinema (Biller is the director of the cult classic The Love Witch). A young romance writer is seduced by a handsome ne’er-do-well who makes himself out to be a wealthy gentleman. Soon, he shows himself to be a brutal lover and more concerned with borrowing from her dwindling savings than making any money of his own. And yet, she has fallen in love with him…or so she tells herself, but Biller skillfully portrays the gaslighting and abuse that reduce her heroine to making excuses for her boorish husband. –MO Aden Polydoros, Wrath Becomes Her (Inkyard) In this gorgeously written, brutally powerful take on the Golem legend, a teenage girl is killed in the Holocaust and brought back by her father as a clay creature, seeking vengeance. Her violence is effective, but soon channeled for more than vengeance, and she must take a stand against those who would exploit her for evil. –MO Nat Cassidy, Nestlings (Tor Nightfire) A couple with a baby gains access to the perfect two-bedroom in Nat Cassidy’s ode to creepy New York legacy apartment buildings. Ana and Reid are struggling after birth leaves Ana paralyzed, and they worry about moving to a higher floor in terms of emergencies and accessibility, but the apartment is just too nice to say no to. There’s a reason they’re being welcomed into the building, however: their neighbors have sinister motivations. Of note is the novel’s take on antisemitism as horror, in the guise of a hateful former landlord echoing currently rising prejudices. –MO C. J. Skuse, Sweetpea (HQ) This one might be the most misanthropic on the list. The narrator of Sweetpea is anything but; she hates her partner, barely tolerates her friends, and labors meticulously over a kill list of everyone who’s ever annoyed her, from the grocery clerk who mishandles her orders to the skinny 20-something sleeping with her husband. From bruised vegetables, to butchered humans, the violence in this one escalates quickly. Very Serial Mom vibes. –MO Olivia Worley, People to Follow (Wednesday Books) 10 influencers head to a remote location for three weeks turned off from their phones, convinced they’re the stars of a new reality show—but not long after they arrive, influencers start dropping like follower counts, as their darkest secrets are revealed to their legions of fans. I’m really enjoying this trend of “books where annoying people who are internet famous kill each other.” –MO Anbara Salam, Hazardous Spirits (Tin House) This charming, evocative, and very well-researched book about Evelyn Hazard, a young woman in 1920s Edinburgh whose husband claims he can communicate with the dead, and the madness that ensues from their getting sucked into the wildly eccentric Spiritualist movement. Unsure if her husband is a fraud or if the entire metaphysical world she has come to know is a lie, Evelyn must guard herself and her life, especially after things begin to unravel and secrets come to light. If you need me, I will be reading this in bed with a flashlight. –OR Lev AC Rosen, The Bell in the Fog (Forge) Lev Rosen’s Lavender House perfectly captured its 1950s setting while bringing queer stories to the fore. It also introduced a detective I’d follow through any number of books, Evander (Andy) Mills, so it’s great to see the private dick return for a new foray into the shadows of a repressed, but vibrant, era. In The Bell in the Fog, Rosen’s detective has set up shop above a gay bar offering investigative services to the queer community when he receives a visit from an old flame from the Navy. The ex is being blackmailed, and the further Andy digs, the more dangerous his sleuthing becomes. –MO Laurence Leamer, Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession (Putnam) From the author of Capote’s Women comes about book about Hitchcock’s longtime fixation on a highly specific interpretation of womanhood and femininity. Essential reading for anyone interested in the great director and how his tastes were instrumental in creating the dense thriller and noir aesthetic we see today. –OR Hye-Young Pyun, The Owl Cries Translated by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade) Hye-Young Pyun’s stunning psychological thrillers delve deep into the horrors of being human and the oppressive mechanics of modern society, and The Owl Cries demonstrates a writer at the top of her game. In The Owl Cries, a ranger has vanished from a mysterious forest and its secluded company town of loggers and researchers. His brother, a divorce lawyer, embarks on a lackadaisical investigation into the disappearance, but soon finds himself mired in the town’s corruption and enmeshed in its secrets. Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (Knopf) Reid dives into one of the darker chapters in a century filled with them for the CIA, telling the story of the CIA-backed web of conspiracies to depose and ultimately kill Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s post-independence prime-minister. The history is a swirl of paranoia and Cold War machinations, and Reid does an admirable job bringing all the players together as the international disgrace spreads and the events careen toward their tragic conclusion. –DM Mónica Ojeda, Nefando Translated by Sarah Booker (Coffee House Press) Ojeda’s novel is a deeply unsettling mashup of genres and influences. With two young women at the center and a wide cast of eccentrics and seers, we’re brought into close contact with a warped vision of intensified youth and horror. –DM Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein Translated by Laura Watkinson (HarperVia) Between Poor Things and this rich historical novel, there’s a lot of Frankenstein content coming out, this autumn. Hot Frankenstein Fall, we might say! I don’t know. I’m sorry. >grunts and drags self away< Anyway, I’m sorry to joke because I take Anne Eekhout’s wonderful novel extremely seriously. It’s about the strange, electric summer in 1816 Geneva when Mary Shelly conceived of Frankenstein, but also the even stranger, less-famous summer in 1812 Dundee when Mary made a powerful bond with a girl named Isabella. –OR Laurent Petitmangin, What You Need from the Night Translated by Shaun Whiteside (Other Press) What You Need from the Night captures the complex dynamics of a widower and his two sons, one of whom rebels against his left wing father by joining in with a far right crowd. The two grapple over the moral education of the younger son, and their conflict grows as the behavior of the right wing nationalists in town escalates. A fascinating portrait of politics tearing a family apart, and a haunting noir about the ways in which love competes with morality. –MO Nicola Lagioia, The City of the Living Translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa) I don’t think it’s possible to praise this book enough. The City of the Living is a novel, but it closely follows a real-life crime committed in Italy in 2015, when two young men, after a days-long drug binge, brutally murdered another young man in a senseless and bizarre crime. Nicola Lagioia teases out all the complex threads of the case, including the ambiguous sexual dynamic between the perpetrators, the homophobia that colored public response, the victim’s right wing sympathies, and the enormous class differences between the killers and their target. With obvious echoes of Leopold and Loeb, this novel also evokes the same sensibilities as Micah Nemerever’s These Violent Delights. Also, be warned: if you look it up, you will get the song Ciao Amore stuck in your head for quite some time. –MO Dan McDorman, West Heart Kill (Knopf) With this ultra-clever and teasingly metafictional debut, Dan McDorman has both created a perfect locked room mystery and exploded it. Set in the 70s (or is it so meta as to only have the setting of Now and the character of the Reader?), the story follows a cast of bored, drunken rich people at their elite summer club, where two interlopers have arrived for the weekend: the first Jewish applicant for membership, and a poetically weary private detective who (in my mind at least) definitely pulls off his blonde mustache. After everyone sleeps with everyone else, some murders happen. So yeah, basically The Ice Storm as if written by Borges, then solved by Chandler. –MO Alix E. Harrow, Starling House (Tor) Harrow has crafted an evocative and propulsive gothic thriller with Starling House. Opal is a young woman burdened young with responsibility for her brother. Each night, she dreams of her town’s mysterious and enormous gothic manor, until one day she convinces the manor’s reclusive (and rather handsome) inhabitant Arthur to hire her as a cleaner for the home. As Opal and Arthur restore the mansion to its former glory, those who would threaten it begin to close in on the home’s dark secrets, and a magical confrontation looms that is as devastating as it is satisfying. –MO Kirsten McDougal, She’s a Killer (Gallic) Ritu Mukerji, Murder By Degrees (Simon & Schuster) If you like gaslit mysteries and intrepid lady sleuths, this one’s for you! I was entranced by Ritu Mukerji’s spooky, exacting mystery set in late-nineteenth Philadelphia. It is about a woman, Dr. Lydia Weston an anatomist and professor at Woman’s Medical College, who suspects foul play when the body of a young woman is pulled out of the river, while also investigating the disappearance of a young patient. –OR Lori Rader-Day, The Death of Us (William Morrow) There was a brief moment when I thought The Death of Us was going to be the death of me–in a good way! Disappearances, re-appearances, children with mysterious pasts, women when even more mysterious pasts… this novel will submerge you in secrets and twists until you can barely breathe. –OR ___________________________________ NOVEMBER ___________________________________ Linda Cheng, Gorgeous Gruesome Faces (Roaring Brook Press) In this high-concept horror, Cheng’s narrator Sunny is a disgraced former member of a manufactured girl group that was meant for K-pop stardom—at least, until one of the members killed herself, and the other cuts off all contact with Sunny. When Sunny finds a chance to reconnect with her bandmate, and finally understand what went wrong, she leaps in without hesitation: there’s a new contest to become the next big pop idol, and she’ll stay in the program until she discovers the truth, no matter how dangerous. –MO Delphine de Vigan, Kids Run the Show Translated by Alison Anderson (Europa) Damn, this book got dark. Like, you think it can’t get any darker, then it does. In Kids Run the Show, the younger child of a prominent mommy vlogger is kidnapped, and as the search continues, the reader begins to wonder if the child might be better off wherever they are than at home being constantly filmed. De Vigan has written a blistering critique of influencer culture, the erasure of privacy, and the exploitation of children. The prophetic ending takes us decades into the future to contemplate the psychological wounds of a generation raised to perform on the internet, for a deeply unsettling experience. –MO Charlotte Vassell, The Other Half (Anchor Books) Is the influencer at the heart of Charlotte Vassell’s new murder-mystery-of-manners truly passionate about brand partnerships and makeup? Or is it all an ironic scheme concocted to impress the art world? It’s up to the detectives to find out when she’s found murdered just after her wealthy paramour’s blow-out birthday party. –MO Lee Matthew Goldberg, The Great Gimmelmans (Level Best Books) Sometimes, desperation can unveil new skills—at least, that’s what happens to the Gimmelman family after they lose their money in the Crash of 87 and find themselves surprisingly good at recouping their finances in a rather risky way. Specifically, robbing banks. Lee Matthew Goldberg has crafted an uproarious send-off of American capitalism in its greediest decade, and created a lovable bunch of outlaws to boot. –MO Femi Kayode, Gaslight (Mulholland) Investigative psychologist Philip Taiwo is back in this gripping, splashy mystery about the pastor of a Nigerian megachurch accused of killing his wife. But, as Taiwo knows, as often with religious operations like this, nothing is what it seems. –OR Christina Henry, Good Girls Don’t Die (Berkley) In this very satisfying thriller, three women wake up in strange versions of classic story set-ups—one is trapped in a domestic thriller, another in a tale of horror, and a third in a gladiatorial competition. Why are they there? Is there a way out? And can this please be turned into a Black Mirror episode? –MO Paul Caruana Galizia, A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice (Riverhead) In 2017, the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb in Malta, her home island, where she had long reported on endemic corruption. Now, her son, Paul Caruana Galizia, who has taken up his mother’s mantle along with his brothers and father, tells her story, and the story of their small nation with very big problems. –DM Grace Elizabeth Hale, In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning (Little, Brown) Grace Elizabeth Hale is a scholar of white supremacy currently teaching at the University of Virginia. Her family had passed down a story about her grandfather, a sheriff in Mississippi who supposedly prevented a suspect in his custody, a Black man accused of rape, from a lynching. But when Hale decides to investigate the family lore, she finds a much darker story, hidden for generations. This is historical research of the most urgent, personal sort, and a powerfully told story. –DM Ed Park, Same Bed, Different Dreams (Ballantine) Ed Park’s wonderful, kaleidoscopic new novel asks what the world would look like if the Korean Provisional Government still existed. Part imagined alternate history, part reflection on twentieth century culture, it tells of a former writer-turned tech worker who comes across a manuscript that seems to belong to the KPG that tells of an impossible world. A beguiling, bewitching novel. –OR Lindsay Hunter, Hot Springs Drive (Roxane Gay Books) Two neighboring families become hopelessly entangled in Hunter’s viciously insightful new novel. Jackie and Theresa decide together to lose weight, but as Jackie sheds pounds, she’s consumed by a new hunger: that of feeling wanted, not as a mother, but as a woman. An affair with Theresa’s husband culminates in Theresa’s murder by Jackie’s eldest son, and Lindsay Hunter uses almost the entire second half of the novel to explore the lingering consequences of impulsive acts. This is sure to be considered one of the best psychological thrillers of the year. –MO Katherine Howe, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself (Henry Holt) I’m going to be very honest—you had me at “pyrates,” Katherine Howe. But the book gets even better than that. It’s the story of Marian Beresford, a professor in the 1930s who comes across an account of a young woman living in eighteenth century Boston who disguises herself as a boy and joins a pirate crew, in hopes to track down a treasure in the Caribbean. But as she comes to identify with the woman—Hannah—she also suspects that she might have been hiding something. Shiver. Me. Timbers. –OR Ausma Zehanat Khan, Blood Betrayal (Minotaur) Ausma Zehanat Khan relocated from Canada to Colorado a few years back, so it makes sense for her to have launched a new Colorado-set series with last year’s Blackwater Falls. Now, her new heroine, Detective Inaya Rahman, returns, in another high-profile case with protests on both sides. I can’t wait to dive into this complex procedural with a social justice lens. –MO Nita Prose, The Mystery Guest (Ballantine) A meticulous maid in a five star hotel finds herself at the center of a murder mystery when a guest—a world famous author of murder mysteries—dies in the hotel’s very public tea room. Prose sets up a classic mystery with a few deft notes of psychological suspense to create a heady whirlwind of an investigation. –DM Elizabeth Crook, The Madstone (Little, Brown) Elizabeth Crook is already a household name in Texas, but The Madstone should establish her as a national figure, evoking the works of Charles Portis and Larry McMurtry as we go on a harrowing (and sometimes humorous) ride through 1868 Texas. The Madstone follows a young German Texan as he travels from the Hill Country to the Gulf Coast trying to shepherd a woman and her young child to safety, and find his own way to maturity and understanding the world around him. –MO Harry N. MacLean, Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree that Changed America (Counterpoint) In this deeply empathetic take on the tale of 19-year-old spree killer Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, all the assumptions made over the years about the two are questioned, and Caril Ann Fugate’s role in particular is reevaluated. When the two went on trial for the 1958 murders that made both infamous, Fugate was painted as either a murderous femme fatale or a heartless collaborator, rather than a victim of threats, domestic abuse, and terrible circumstances. MacLean rights the record and gets deep into the psychology of not only his subjects, but their claustrophobic and constrained time and place. –MO ___________________________________ DECEMBER ___________________________________ Caz Frear, Five Bad Deeds (Harper) Caz Frear’s new novel is deliciously wicked, following a mother and teacher who’s been receiving messages threatening to expose her past secrets. Unfortunately, she has no idea of what they’re talking about (or perhaps too many ideas). And as the disruptions to her life escalate, so too does her introspection—what could she have done to make someone so angry? –MO Chris McKinney, Sunset Water City (Soho Crime) Finally we have the third installment of McKiney’s Water City trilogy, a sci-fi noir trifecta. In this volume, our anonymous ex-detective protagonist passes his responsibilities onto his daughter Ascalon, now nineteen and ready to see who among the ravaged human race she can save. –OR Alexis Soloski, Here in the Dark (Flatiron) Everyone loves to hate a theater critic, as theater critic Alexis Soloski knows all too well, and Here in the Dark takes the beloved trope of the murdered critic and gets meta with it. The critic of Soloski’s novel is already stressed enough about her future job prospects, her past secrets, and the state of American theater today, when she gets involved with a missing persons case and stumbles across a dead body. In between sleeping around, drinking far too much, and reviewing dreck in terms cruel enough to secure death threats, Soloski’s heroine just may have it in her to unravel the complex mystery. But will she (or her liver) make it safely to the conclusion? That’s up to me to know and you to find out. –MO View the full article

“A literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all, and will not last.” Frank O’Connor laid it out. He wrote the words at the cusp of the 20th century. Said words prophesied the hard-boiled novel. Hard-boiled scorched its artistic debut on February 1, 1929. Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, hit bookstores. Hammett’s narrator, the Continental Op, goes in strong: “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.” Hammett slammed the tonal chord for the entire hard-boiled canon. The vulgarization of American Literature tapped Art. Hammett was our first great hard-boiled artist. He vulgarized the American idiom and reinvented our native slang. It’s the language of disparagement and one-upsmanship. Hammett revised the myth of the frontier male and recast it as urban estrangement. “The core of Hammett’s art is the masculine figure in American society. He is primarily a job-holder. He goes at his job with a bloodthirsty determination that proceeds from an unwillingness to go beyond it.” David T. Bazelon laid it out. He adroitly summarized Hammett’s career and my career before I was born. Hammett and I comprise the alpha and the omega of the American hard-boiled novel. Ninety-four years, six months, eleven days. That’s the distance between the publication of Red Harvest and the pub date of my new novel, The Enchanters. X X X X X It’s the sizzling summer of 1962. I’m 14 and suffer from a kid case of male malaise. I bop around L.A. and emit bad vibes. I sniff cultural trends. They vex me. Mattress Jack Kennedy gores my goat. He’s out to remake the world in my non-image and scotch my shot to be prez and find a girlfriend. Three-hour Italian flicks glorify dislocation. I’m a Lutheran choirboy torched by deep belief and unsavory imagination. L.A. ’62 gored my goat. Glass skyscrapers disrupted my perfect skyline. Cars went aerodynamically svelte. Book typeface went to lower-case letters. Furniture went space age. The culture went batshit crazy and stirred my wrath. It’s modernism, redux. Talk about dislocation. 1920s Berlin dropped on my head. I had an afternoon paper route. I delivered the Marilyn Monroe dope-OD headlines. Subscribers stood on their porches and snatched the papers out my hands. A little gear in my head went click-click. I read the L.A. Herald cover to cover. The daily news vexed me. I was prone to vexation and jejune rage. I was set to start high school in September. It scared me. Everything scared me and enraged me. I lived to read hard-boiled crime novels. I recast myself as the frontier male up against urban estrangement. I talked to women who weren’t in the room with me. That habit persists to this day. I was learning to shut the world out and live within myself. I was that way in ’62. I’m that way today. The summer of ’62 was an all-time horrorshow-blast. I knew I’d write a book about it one day. X X X X X I lived with my loser dad and an unhousebroken hound dog. Our pad clipped the south edge of Hollyweird. South Hollyweird adjoined swank Hancock Park. I walked my hound dog late at night and peeped windows. The Wilshire branch library stood close. I scored my crime novels and true-crime books there. I scored my adults-only fare at Crown Liquor. Crown catered to a juicehead-divorced dad clientele. Paramount wage slaves glommed their jungle juice and TV dinners there. Amphetamine-pushing male prostitutes lived above the store. They fueled my epic reading binges for a dizzy decade-plus. Crown featured two paperback racks. Rack #1 veered upscale. Irving Wallace, Jackie Susann, Harold Robbins. They were pop-fiction class acts by Crown Liquor standards. Rack #2 smut-scorched you. The Stewardesses, The Call Girls, The Nymphomaniacs, The Housewives, The Gynecologists, The World Rapers. I gorged off both racks. I read Harold Robbins’ masterpiece, The Carpetbaggers. Robbins merged pop-fiction breadth and scope with a hard-boiled style. It was a classic roman-à-clef job. I transposed myself to the text. I built airplanes with Howard Hughes clone Jonas Cord. I poured the pork to Jean Harlow clone Rina Marlowe. I trekked with a half-paleface/half-Indian kid named Nevada Smith. We hunted down the psycho cowpokes who offed his parents. I designed an aerodynamic brassiere like the one Howard Hughes whipped up for Jane Russell. I lived through the history of the epoch before my birth. The prose was clean and raw. I read The Carpetbaggers for kicks and grins. Robbins wrote the book for my dipshit-kid eyes only. He shot me a backstage pass to the hard-living/hard-loving/adults-only world that The Nymphomaniacs only hinted at. Robbins peaked with The Carpetbaggers. He tanked with The Adventurers and The Inheritors. I dumped him off my must-read list. I went on a detective-novel tear. The seditious ‘60s sizzled as I peeped prep-school girls and read American Hard-Boiled Fiction. I got kicked out of high school and the army. My old man died. I returned to L.A. I boosted steaks and books and got in kid scuffles. I got popped for shoplifting, and spent two nights at Georgia Street juvie. I was 17 and too old and malodorous to adopt. The court declared me an emancipated juvenile. I got a job shelving books at the Wilshire branch library. I shelved faaaast. I minutely examined the books I pawed through. I scoped dust-jacket art and read flap copy. I was gobsmacked by the dust jacket on Ross Macdonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse. A white background offset by a hot pink, gray, and black typeface. It was modernist and très true to the time and place: L.A./1962. Plus — there’s the sinfully sinister and symbolic vehicle itself. It’s not quite a morgue van. It’s more like a surf wagon. It connotes Pali High boys in plaid Pendletons and Levi cords, and Hollywood High girls in crocheted bikinis. The jacket seduced me. I read the book. It knocked me flat. I’ve read far better books since. I’ve written far better books. I read Hearse in the mid-fall of 1965. It was published on 11/15/62. It took me back to my very own haunted summer. It gave me the already moribund gestalt of three years back, as the ‘60s stumbled and pratfalled ahead. It gave me bombed-out expatriates, the depraved rich, the corrupting legacy of unearned money. It gave me minute domestic grief as the grounds for homicide. It threw my smogbound home town back at me and exhorted me to top this!!!!! It gave me 278 pages of breathless plot and ceaseless detectives’ insight. I fell under the spell of a big and klutzy rich girl named Harriet Blackwell. I loved her in the mid-fall of 1965 — and I’ve loved her that much more on a dozen successive rereads. It was the most exultant reading experience of my young life. Ross Macdonald dropped a match and sent me to Cinder City. I discovered the beauty of tragedy. I’m ever the Lutheran choirboy. I caught glimmers of redemption in murderous squalor. X X X X X COVID was good to me. I hide and shut the world out in prosaic times. Exceptional times do not alter my routine. Young to old, then to now. I ignore the contemporaneous world and live in the historical eras I depict in my books. I’ve been interviewed six trillion times. I’ve been the subject of seven documentary films. Interviewers harp on my mother’s 1958 murder and cite childhood trauma as the fount of my gifts. I’ve played along. It jukes book sales. Disingenuousness is a sin. I’m writing this essay in the spirit of atonement. My ongoing biography should be revised to reflect this: I’m just a numbnuts kid who loves to read. The books I read taught me to write. I love American Hard-Boiled Fiction. I rarely stray from that oft-maligned canon. The Enchanters hits bookstores September 12. It’s far and away my best book. It’s an ode to Red Harvest, The Carpetbaggers, The Stewardesses, The Call Girls, The Nymphomaniacs, and The Zebra-Striped Hearse. It’s a monument to Crown Liquor. The Enchanters recreates hellhound summer ’62. It gives form to all my buried lusts and fears. It features my late pal Freddy Otash, the overhyped Marilyn Monroe, the groovy L.A. cops Daryl Gates and Whiskey Bill Parker, the redoubtable Robert F. Kennedy. The Enchanters is modernist. The fractured love scenes exceed the fractured love scenes in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Antonioni’s L’Avventura. The book reads modernist and looks modernist. I want readers to grok my books for their sheer design sense. The look of this book immolated my brain before any and all textual considerations. “Opportunity is love.” It’s my get-through-life maxim. Freddy Otash voices it in The Enchanters. I’m paying off a debt to my creative antecedents. They’re long gone now. The Enchanters was calculatedly conceived. I’m out to give Joe and Jane Reader the jazzy book thrills of my youth. Joe and Jane, I wrote my best book for you. James Ellroy Denver, Colorado, 5/18/23 Author image by Marion Ettlinger View the full article

The following is an excerpt from Nathan Ward’s new book about Charlie Siringo: Son of the Old West, now available from Atlantic Monthly Press. ___________________________________ Along the snowy road from Cheyenne toward Fort Douglas, the roundup season was well finished. This was the time of year when the Round-up Number 5 saloon held on to what few paying customers strayed in. It was a low-ceilinged country bar on the Douglas road that made most of its year’s money off seasonal cowboys, and so lavished attention on winter visitors like the guest who called himself Charlie Henderson. Looking disheveled but approachable, less like a killer than a common outlaw, he wore a rounded mustache slightly darker than his ruddy face, a strapped Colt bulging a little through his shirt. His hosts were the saloon’s lonely owners, an older couple named Howard. The husband had first been a policeman and saloon owner in Cheyenne, where he met his wife, who had worked as both a dance-hall girl and a professional fighter. As the Howards drank with him in their quiet bar, Charlie Henderson explained that he was a Texan driven north by mysterious troubles. As he collected himself to go, the Howards coaxed him back inside for a last round, leading Charlie to return the favor and so on. He struggled to climb aboard his horse a second time, and asked about places to stay on his way to Fort Douglas, saying he would be all right if he could just “run across some Texas boys.” Howard warned him off stopping at the Keeline Ranch several miles way, as those Texans were ex-convicts who hated visitors and might happily kill him. Siringo answered that as long as they were Texans, he would take his chances. Before mounting up, he made sure to buy a bottle of Howard’s high-labeled cheap whiskey, which he slipped in his coat as a gift for the strangers. He had intended to play it a bit drunk as he rode off in search of the horse trail, but the last rounds had added to his boozy authenticity. Spurring his horse and giving a yell, he made a crashing exit through the timber toward the bridle path Howard had reluctantly described. As his new friends watched him nervously out of their sight, he planned to fake a broken leg for his first impression on the outlaws. High in the range he was crossing, he dismounted at an inclined spot on the trail, then shoved downhill at his horse until the animal finally rolled over in a dry arroyo, leaving a dusty impression, in case his accident story was later checked. He next ripped his jean leg almost to the knee, rubbed the skin with grass and rolled up his wool drawers above the kneecap to present a scratched, swollen look, pouring on some of the Howards’ cheap whiskey as a last touch. The scar from Sam Grant’s long-ago shot added to the knee’s injured look. After tying his loose boot to his saddle, he carried on toward the Keeline Ranch, leg hanging uselessly outside the stirrup as he emerged from a stand of cottonwoods around sunset and spotted some log buildings. A gang of men soon appeared, led by a rangy figure who turned out to be the Keeline’s foreman, Tom Hall, demanding to know “what the hell” young Henderson was doing at his ranch. When Charlie announced his leg was broken, the group carried the small stranger off his horse and into the house, where Hall inspected the knee and pronounced it merely sprained, then washed and wrapped it. A search party with lamps was dispatched to backtrail and check for signs his horse had truly rolled, as Charlie claimed, then to confirm he’d been directed to them by the saloonkeeper, Howard. Nursing his fake injury by the fireplace was the deepest any detective had penetrated the Keeline compound. Siringo immediately recognized a “sullen, dark-complexioned man” from his boyhood days in south Texas, Jim McChesney, and worried the recognition was mutual when he asked Charlie if he was one of the scandalous “Pumphry boys” who had left town after a family killing. Siringo curtly answered, “I go by ‘Henderson’ now.” After serving their crippled guest a late supper, Hall gave him his own room, where Charlie unwrapped and stretched his leg, sleeping with his head on his “war bag” holding his belt of cartridges. His hidden Colt and bowie knife had somehow escaped notice when the men had carried him to the house. But that night, the gang discussed hanging him to scare a confession out of him, he later learned. Hall overruled the skeptics, arguing that if he was a detective it would emerge over time anyway, and they could enjoy hanging him then. After a fitful night, Charlie rewrapped his leg and hobbled to breakfast for the gang’s verdict. Hall fashioned him a wooden crutch, welcoming him for now to the desperado ranch. Illustration by Nick Ward. Over the next weeks, Charlie stumped around with the gang, tying his crutch to his saddle when they rode as a group. His quarry, Bill McCoy, had left before Siringo even arrived, sent over the mountains on Tom Hall’s roan horse and now on his way to New Orleans, where he planned to board a steamer and carry Hall’s letter of introduction with him to a gang in Buenos Aires. From Jim McChesney, Charlie had learned something else about McCoy, that he was a Texas cowboy Charlie had known from the Panhandle, when he went by Bill Gatlin. Siringo’s upbringing had so far kept him alive. The gang traveled together to a sporting house a mile outside Fort Laramie. All danced and drank and shot out windows except for Charlie, who used the excuse that his crutch kept him from dancing. He sneaked into town as the party raged and checked into a hotel long enough to write home and mail reports to tell the Denver office that Bill McCoy was in New Orleans. Then, as the soberest man in the group, Siringo inherited the job of settling the men on their horses, removing the cartridges from Jim McChesney’s sidearm, which Jim uselessly snapped at enemies on the weaving ride home. The saloonkeeper Mr. Howard, who had reluctantly directed Siringo to the Keeline, appeared one night, heavy with the news that his wife was dying. Howard was a tolerant friend of the gang, so Hall assembled the men to ride together to his bar to keep a drinking vigil. Mrs. Howard demanded liquor to the end, dying around midnight, when they staged a wake for her in the saloon, shooting holes in the walls as the whiskey stocks drained. Later, during the ceremony to lower her into the hard ground, among the toasts and other songs, Charlie heard the mourners sing one that was possibly ominous: Oh see the train go ’round the bend, Goodbye, my lover, goodbye; She’s loaded down with Pinkerton men, Goodbye, my lover, goodbye. Siringo finally tossed away his crutch before the gang made its next long ride from the ranch to Fort Laramie. He staged his recovery in order to dance with a young woman whom he could later pretend to visit when he finally disappeared for the railroad station. He again slipped away from the party long enough to send more reports. Siringo’s original target had fled to South America, but he had learned enough from his weeks with the gang, including heart-to-hearts with Hall and McChesney, to send a posse back for them from Cheyenne. A little after sunrise, a group of riders appeared at the edge of the timber stand overlooking the log houses. When they rode up to arrest the sleeping gang, Tom Hall remarked, “That damned Henderson is at the bottom of this.” Charlie had never returned from his last visit to his girl. Life undercover would become increasingly murky. Siringo testified against the gang to a grand jury convened in Cheyenne, but when the case fell apart before trial, he found he was strangely glad for his “friends.” Having done his job well, he had nevertheless come to enjoy these Texans whose lives echoed his own. “My friends were liberated to my great joy,” he wrote. In one sense, the manhunt had been a failure, since the real culprit, Bill McCoy, had already killed again and joined a new group of Texas outlaws on the Argentine Pampas. Tom Hall, whom Charlie would later see in Utah running a saloon under his real name, Tom Nichols, had shown a big heart in caring for a stranger’s “broken” leg and saved his life when others demanded his hanging. Charlie had returned the favor poorly. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Son of the Old West: The Odyssey of Charlie Siringo: Cowboy, Detective, Writer of the Wild Frontier, by Nathan Ward. Published by Atlantic Monthly Press. Copyright 2023. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. View the full article

Sure, island vacations can be fun, relaxing, and restorative. But that’s if you’re reading a book in a different genre. In the world of crime, island vacations can be murder. Ever since Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley headed to Italy to bring Dickie Greenleaf back home, the allure of something sinister taking place on an island destination is unquenchable, for authors and readers alike. My latest, out September 5th. In Beneath the Surface, on a weekend voyage on a yacht to Catalina Island off the California coast, the power-hungry children of an aging billionaire are unprepared for a storm of deceptions. May Cobb calls it “Devious, twisty, and completely unputdownable . . . Knives Out meets Succession, but on a billionaire’s yacht.” It’s not the vacation the family thought they’d have, but it’s likely the only vacation they deserved. In You Can Trust Me by Wendy Heard you can take another sinister journey, this time to a sun-drenched private island off the California coast. Summer and Leo are best friends, and free-spirited grifters who find themselves in the crosshairs of a self-made billionaire and philanthropist with his own island. When Leo disappears as her scam goes awry, Summer springs into action. People magazine raves that it’s a “thriller with a sharp take on wealth and privilege”. An ultra-exclusive private club off the coast of England is your getaway spot in The Club by Ellery Lloyd. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to visit an exclusive celebrity club, well, hopefully this isn’t what it’s like. The lucky, A-list guests have been invited to Island Home for its three-day launch party, but behind the scenes, the staff has been pushed to their limits. everyone has been pushed to their limits. What’s clear is nothing is as it seems on this island, or with THE CLUB that everyone is dying to join. In The Guest List by Lucy Foley an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate a wedding. Sounds fun, right. Well, not in a crime book island vacation. The bride, the plus one, the best man, the wedding planner, and the bridesmaid gather for a social media and magazine worthy ceremony with all the luxury trappings. Until someone turns up dead. They All Fall Down by Rachel Howzell Hall is set on a luxurious private island off the coast of Mexico, nestled in the glorious Sea of Cortez. Miriam Macy sails off to the island, as do six other strangers, only to discover that they’ve been summoned under false pretenses. Danger lurks in the lush forest of the island, and cell-phone coverage is sporadic as strange accidents stir suspicions and one by one, they all fall down. Jen Weinstein and Lauren Parker rule the town of Salcombe, Fire Island every summer. In Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum, the two women hold sway on the beach and the tennis court and manipulate everyone to get what they want. The season starts out the same as any other, until a body is discovered, face down, off the side of the boardwalk. In this picture perfect place, everyone has something to hide. Fire Island’s exclusive summer haven is the perfect setting for murder, as are many islands it seems. *** View the full article

Of mythological figures of antiquity, none are more monstrous than harpies, furies, gorgons—Scylla and Charybdis, Lamia, Chimera, Sphinx—nightmare creatures representing, to the affronted male gaze, the perversion of “femininity”: the female who in her physical being repulses sexual desire, rather than arousing it; the female who has repudiated the traditional role of submission, subordination, maternal nurturing. Since these fantasy figures have been created by men, we can assume that the female monster is a crude projection of male fears; she is the embodiment of female power uncontrolled by the male, who has most perversely taken on some of the qualities of the male hero—physical prowess, bellicosity and cunning, an appetite for vengeance and cruelty. As in the most lurid male fantasies of sadism and masochism, the female monster threatens castration and something even more primeval: humiliation. Consider Medusa, the quintessential emblem of female body horror. We all know who Medusa was, yes?—a demonic female figure, a gorgon, with writhing venomous serpents springing from her head, and a face of surpassing ugliness; a bestial creature so horrific to behold that anyone who gazed upon her turned to stone. Since Medusa was also a mortal woman, the “hero” Perseus succeeded in beheading her, by observing her not directly but through a shield; as a favorite of the goddess Athena, Perseus then used Medusa’s severed head as a weapon of his own, turning enemies to stone. Less generally known is that, in some variants of this legend, Medusa was originally an exceptionally beautiful young woman, with particularly beautiful hair; like many other mortal women in classical mythology, Medusa was raped by a god, in this case Neptune, king of the sea; because the rape occurred in the temple of Athena, the goddess was outraged, and with the cruel illogic of the patriarchy—Athena, born out of the head of Zeus, with no mother, was a male cohort—she punished the rape victim, not the rapist, transforming the beautiful Medusa into the horrific gorgon, with snakes springing from her head, and a very ugly face. A cautionary tale: women should be beautiful and desirable even as they will be punished for being beautiful and desirable, at least outside the protective perimeters of marriage. Should we know nothing of the female monsters of antiquity, still we would know that body horror in its myriad manifestations speaks most powerfully to women and girls. To be female is to inhabit a body that is by nature vulnerable to forcible invasion, susceptible to impregnation and repeated pregnancies, condemned to suffer childbirth, often in the past early deaths in childbirth and in the aftermath of childbirth. Fairy tales abound in stepmothers precisely because so many young wives died in childbirth that men naturally remarried as many times as their resources allowed. Even in civilized Western nations, to be female has been to be a kind of chattel, in lifetime thrall to the patriarchy; women could not own property, divorce, vote, take out mortgages, even acquire credit cards until relatively recently. Throughout history the female body has been condemned as the occasion for sin, for arousing sexual desire in the male. Strict dress codes for women are a characteristic of patriarchal religions in which female physicality is considered repugnant, while male physicality—virility—is revered. The punishment of Medusa is in line with age-old punishments for women and girls who have the bad luck to attract unwanted sexual attention from men; but to spurn such a role, refusing to marry, to procreate, to acquiesce to the model of meek, subservient femininity, symbolized, for instance, by the Virgin Mary, has been to risk being declared unnatural—“bitch,” “witch.” The ultimate punishment of the female who resists femininity was to be burned at the stake, condemned to death by religious patriarchs for the good of the commonweal. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), a fever dream of an epistolary novel, the most powerful passages spring from dreamlike, surreal sources of anxiety: the creature assembled by Dr. Frankenstein is the very embodiment of a freakish birth, oversized, with ill-matching parts taken from a graveyard and a yellowish, parchment-like skin. We know that Mary Shelley was only eighteen at the time she began composing Frankenstein; she was unmarried and pregnant, living with the Romantic poet Percy Shelley with whom she had eloped to Italy, in unstable circumstances; Percy Shelley had left behind a teenaged wife in England, the mother of his child, who would soon commit suicide. Amid such turmoil and uncertainty, Mary Shelley created one of the most horrific of literary monsters, as if fantasizing the worst possibilities of the impending birth; it’s likely too that Mary Shelley identified with the creature, in his feelings of isolation and exile. (As it happened, the baby Mary Shelley was carrying during the composition of Frankenstein would die at birth; she would have three other babies who also died, and only one who survived. Until the sudden death of Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley was almost continuously pregnant or nursing for eight years.) In recent decades, body horror has been established as a literary subgenre of horror and dark fantasy. Monsters and freaks of all kinds have always abounded in popular fiction and movies, and in such cult classics as Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932)—a graphic film more disturbing in our time than it was decades ago when the casting of grotesquely disabled people as “freaks” was not viewed as morally repugnant. A director generally recognized as a master of high-quality body horror is David Cronenberg, whose films (The Brood, Dead Ringers, Crash, Crimes of the Future) contain visceral, visual shocks that function as both literal and psychological horror. (The sight of the naked body of the estranged wife and mother in The Brood, whose hatred of her ex-husband has hideously deformed her body, is one of the most memorable.) Nor is anyone who has read Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love likely to forget the carnival family whose grotesque brood has been deliberately created by the parents with the aid of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioscopes—a Dickensian tale in which the surreal and the “real” collide in an exploration of a capitalist-consumer society from the perspective of self-defined “freaks” who are not ashamed but proud of their lineage. * The body horror of A Darker Shade of Noir is as varied and unpredictable as the writers exploring the genre, and as unclassifiable as the hauntingly sinister illustrations by Laurel Hausler that accompany them. Though the protagonists of the stories may wreak havoc upon others or are victims themselves of bodily horror, it is only in Cassandra Khaw’s lyrically realized evocation of lycanthropy, “Muzzle,” that a female protagonist is a monster—“My own wolf, the one that had slept encysted in my lizard brain.” In Aimee Bender’s bizarrely conversational “Frank Jones,” a young female office worker creates her own miniature Frankenstein out of peculiar growths emerging from her body, which she employs to keep her coworkers at a respectful distance; she has been accused of “loneliness” and “weirdness” in the workplace, and this is her self-defense. Megan Abbott (“Scarlet Ribbons”), whose prose fiction typically moves with the disconcerting swiftness of a suspense film, depicts the terrifying night world that lurks beneath the day world of an ordinary suburban neighborhood in which a grisly family murder has occurred, as it is experienced by a young girl mesmerized by tales she has heard of a loving father bludgeoning his family to death—a loving father not unlike her own. In Joanna Margaret’s suspenseful “Malena” a female sculptor must contend with the monstrous being—a “parasitic twin”— emerging from within her own body, while in Tananarive Due’s “Dancing,” a selfless forty-year-old woman who has devoted half her life to caring for her infirm grandmother succumbs to a fit of dancing and demonic laughter after her grandmother’s death—her body “at war with itself.” The spirit of her grandmother, denied a career in ballet because of her race, becomes a curse, frenetically dancing through her. The curse of the body at war with itself in a woman who is both a creative artist and Black amid an insidiously racist society is explored with unnerving intensity by Raven Leilani in her harrowing “Breathing Exercise,” which is likely to leave the reader breathless by its end. Lisa Lim’s graphic tale “Dancing with Mirrors” is a terrifying grandmother-mother-daughter parable of how a “toxic tongue” can indeed be a curse on subsequent generations of women; how body dysmorphia may be inherited, not genetically but through the tales we tell about ourselves. Amid this gathering of highly imaginative stories, Margaret Atwood’s “Metempsychosis, or The Journey of the Soul” is very possibly the strangest; but then Atwood, one of the most inventive and original prose writers of our time, is never predictable. In this fabulist tale of a most unusual metempsychosis, a creature of another species finds itself peacefully “space-sharing” with a human woman, a midlevel customer service representative at a bank, with unexpected results for both. In Lisa Tuttle’s savagely satirical “Concealed Carry”—set, appropriately, in the most rabid of American gun states, Texas—a firearm acquires a malevolent life of its own, parasitically attaching itself to a human woman. Aimee LaBrie’s “Gross Anatomy” is the only story in A Darker Shade of Noir with a male protagonist, a medical student whose behavior, with a female corpse in the school’s morgue, is indeed gross—but does not go unpunished. Yumi Dineen Shiroma’s “Her Heart May Fail Her” is a bold appropriation of Bram Stoker’s hapless female characters Lucy and Mina (Dracula), revisioning them in a sensuously evoked erotic triangle, one side of which is a female vampire; while Elizabeth Hand’s “The Seventh Bride, or Female Curiosity” appropriates the centuries-old tale of Bluebeard and his victim-wives, in this case as a traveling theatrical troupe in nineteenth-century England with a most unusual cast of characters both living and deceased. Set as well in the nineteenth century, Valerie Martin’s “Nemesis” pits a vain, callow, narcissistic young man against a canny middle-aged wife and mother whose smallpox-disfigured face the young man finds repulsive, with fitting results for the vain man whose beauty is destroyed forever; while Sheila Kohler’s “Sydney” depicts the marriage of a naïve young girl and a duplicitous older man in a triangular relationship with a most unusual lover. (Since much of A Darker Shade of Noir is, indeed, dark, it seemed appropriate to both begin and end the collection with stories of victim-women who become, in the course of confronting their situations, ingeniously empowered.) “The Chair of Tranquility” may be read as prose fiction or prose poetry, the lone contribution in A Darker Shade of Noir that involves neither the surreal nor the supernatural, but is based upon historical records: the interior monologue of a woman entrapped in a diabolical but widely respected nineteenth-century medical treatment for so-called hysteria. This treatment, known as the “rest cure,” advocated by the distinguished physician Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), was in effect the enforced infantilization of women who may have been in (healthy) revolt against the confinement of their roles in society; any variance from the norm of obedient daughter/wife/mother was considered an aberration, indeed “hysteria,” of which they had to be cured no matter how extreme the price. Through these very different stories, something like a pulse beats in defiant opposition to the confinement of the female by the patriarchy, as by images of self-laceration and defeat internalized by tradition. Whether the rebellion is overt or indirect, successful or fatally thwarted, we are moved deeply by the varying ways in which, in Tananarive Due’s words, a buried dream could be reborn like a curse. Joyce Carol Oates February 2023 ___________________________________ Copyright 2023 Joyce Carol Oates, from the introduction to the anthology A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers edited by Joyce Carol Oates, reprinted by permission from Akashic Books (akashicbooks.com). View the full article

I’ve always been fascinated by families and what drives their unique dynamics. I think perhaps it’s because mine is so small; both my parents are only children and I have only one sibling. But what fascinates me even more than the family we’re born into, is the family we marry. After all, we choose our spouses, but their families come as a package deal. This is probably the moment I should caveat that I have a mother-in-law I adore. But I know that not everyone is as lucky. We all know of a mother-in-law from hell: controlling, conniving, always there to nitpick on the tiniest thing. And so, when I needed a villain for my next thriller, Her Sweet Revenge, I knew just where to look. Geraldine came to me fully formed and leapt onto the page. Wealthy—or so she lets the world believe—pompous, and headstrong in her belief that Helena is nowhere near good enough for her darling son. And she is not afraid to show it, there’s no subtlety to her bullying—no gaslighting or manipulation—just a constant stream of criticism. I dare you not to immediately empathize with poor Helena. Of course, Geraldine isn’t just a cardboard cut-out antagonist dressed in a vintage Diane von Fürstenberg dress and holding court at the country club with her cronies. There is nuance to her; a genuine love for her son, her own less than happy marriage to an abusive husband, the sword of serious money problems that will financially ruin her hanging over her head. But if anything, those things will make you hate her more; because despite all of this, she still expends her energy hating her daughter-in-law. Popular culture is littered with terrible mothers-in-law. Take the 2005 film Monster-In-Law staring Jane Fonda as the titular monster-in-law determined to ruin her son’s impending marriage to his fiancée, played by Jennifer Lopez. Or for a far more sinister take, see Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones and her treatment of daughter-in-law Margaery. Of course, it’s not only mothers-in-law, there are some pretty awful fathers-in-law too! Who could forget Robert De Niro in Meet the Parents, grilling poor Ben Stiller CIA-style? But why do we love to hate on the in-laws? Are they really so bad, or has it just become a running joke, something so ubiquitous it’s become a cliché? Or maybe it’s both of those things; after all, clichés tend to have a root in the truth. Helena in Her Sweet Revenge is hardly alone. While I was writing the novel, I spent a lot of time digging into real life tales of terror: there’s even a subreddit r/mothersinlawfromhell that has over 70,000 members! And that’s before you venture onto MumsNet (a UK-centric website for all things parenting and a mecca of advice and gossip). From tales of a mother-in-law insisting she was right there in the delivery room to witness the birth of her first grandchild like it was some kind of spectator sport; to unwelcome houseguests overstaying their welcome by literally months; to thrice daily calls to “check in” on what her darling son has been eating; to constantly trying to buy bigger and better presents for the kids than the mom, there is seemingly no end to the horror stories! For those who have awful in-laws of their own, the exploration of similar relationships in popular culture may offer a sense of solidarity. And even if you’re lucky—as I am—to enjoy a good relationship with your in-laws, there’s still something alluring in the opportunity to peek behind the curtain of other people’s lives. So here are a few recommendations for other novels which explore the mother-in-law from hell trope (in addition to my new thriller, Her Sweet Revenge, of course!). The Mother-In-Law by Sally Hepworth Lucy has always had a strained relationship with her mother-in-law, Diana. She might have been polite and friendly, but it was clear she didn’t think Lucy measured up. After all, Diana herself was a beloved member of the community, selflessly helping refugees to assimilate. But then Diana is found dead, apparently having committed suicide to end a long battle with cancer. But her autopsy finds no cancer, just evidence of poison and suffocation. Was she murdered? And did it have anything to do with her last-minute changes to her will; one that disinherited both her adult children and their spouses. The Mother-In-Law is twisty and compelling; a proper “read in one sitting” book. The Daughter-In-Law by Nina Manning Annie raised her son, Ben, all by herself. It was just the two of them against the world. Until Ben brings home Daisy, his mysterious new wife who Annie absolutely does not trust. But then Ben disappears, leaving Annie and Daisy alone in her remote house. Tensions rise as Annie attempts to expose the secrets she is convinced her daughter-in-law is keeping. The Daughter-In-Law is a gripping thriller which turns the trope on its head. Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth If you want something a little more horror-esque, check out this darkly funny novel about a woman at war with the vengeful ghost of her mother-in-law. Abby dreams of forging a deep connection with her mother-in-law, Laura. Until Abby and her husband move in with her and she makes their lives a misery. But however cruel she was in life, nothing compares to the nightmare Laura becomes in death. Now Abby must find a way to vanquish the ghost of her mother-in-law and free them from her clutches. *** View the full article

There’s a reason domestic thrillers are perennially popular: fearing the person sleeping next to you every night, realizing too late that the call is coming from inside the house, is enough to send chills up anyone’s spine. But to me, the idea that your closest friends might be the real threat is easily as terrifying as a villainous partner. Friendships can be just as important as romantic relationships, forming a trusted support network and shaping your core identity. If you’re wrong to trust your friends… what else might you be wrong about? In my new thriller, Scenes of the Crime, a group of former friends reconvene at the luxurious winery where Vanessa—their college queen bee—disappeared 15 years ago. While their relationships have changed significantly, the toxicity that was always baked into the group’s dynamic is still going strong. In some of my favorite recent thrillers, “best friend” feels less like a safe space and more like a threat. With friends like these, well… you’d better watch your back. Dirty Laundry – Disha Bose In her small Irish village, Ciara Dunphy’s wealth, looks, and substantial online following turn her every pronouncement into parenting gospel for the mum clique she reigns over. But beneath the polished surface, Ciara’s pristine life is very, very messy. Ciara takes Mishti Guha under her wing, enjoying the cachet Mishti’s “difference” gives her, while readily taking advantage of the unequal power dynamic between them—as a recent transplant struggling in her arranged marriage, Mishti’s only too grateful for the lifeline Ciara offers. But when Mishti befriends Ciara’s rival Lauren—whose crunchy, disheveled family life feels like an affront to everything Ciara embodies—Ciara’s carefully constructed world begins to crumble. And when Ciara turns up dead in her family home, the question isn’t “how could this have happened?” but “which of the many people she’s tormented finally snapped?” A razor-sharp exploration of toxic female friendship and the bloodsport of modern parenting, this stay-up-all-night-to-finish-it book had me guessing until the last page. We Were Never Here – Andrea Bartz You would think killing a man together would be a major “AHA!” moment in a friendship, that inflection point where you realize “hey… maybe we’re not such a dynamic duo…” And for Emily it is… the second time it happens. We Were Never Here is a mesmerizing book that delves deep into the dark underbelly of female friendship, forcing readers to question where the line is between love and control, and between support and complicity. The allure of the friendship between Kristen and Emily is palpable, but the danger they pose to each other (and anyone who dares to get too close) is just as potent. I was left questioning who and what I could trust at every turn. No spoilers, but the final twist was delicious. You’re Invited – Amanda Jayatissa When you learn that your glamorous childhood best friend is hosting a lavish wedding in your mutual hometown in Sri Lanka, there’s really only one thing you can do: fly halfway around the world to try to stop the marriage from happening. At least that’s Amaya’s plan; things quickly spin out of control once she arrives in Colombo, intent on keeping her friend Kaavi from walking down the aisle with her ex, Spencer. From that delightfully messy start, things only get more complicated. No one seems to have actually invited Amaya, for one thing. When the bride goes missing on her wedding day, Kaavi’s presumed-jealous ex-bestie is the prime suspect… but as this twisty narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that anyone could be behind the disappearance. With a fabulously luxurious setting, class tension, an insightful exploration of the cultural tug-of-war between Sri Lankan tradition and modern western life, and a huge dose of the quicksilver ‘reality’ that appears on social media, this book is both thoughtful and bingeable. Counterfeit – Kirstin Chen I’m a complete sucker for “they’re not who you think they are” stories, and this cleverly constructed novel takes that concept to the next level. Not only are the friends at its center waging a zero-sum battle to determine which of them will walk away from the crimes they committed together, those crimes—producing and selling near-perfect counterfeits of luxury handbags—are a sly wink at the question of who, and what, you can trust. As much as I loved the gleeful heist that drove this book, the complicated friendship between Ava and Winnie (and its criminal consequences) was what stuck with me. Leveraging the stereotypes people assume about them for their own gain—in particular the idea of the “model minority”—Ava and Winnie bring out the worst in each other (at least legally speaking) in the best possible way. Am I Being Unreasonable? As a writer who draws as much inspiration from the world of film and TV as from books (see: the screenplay sections in my latest novel), I had to include at least one binge-watch option. And frankly, if I had to pick just one television show to recommend this year, this would be it. An intensely dark comedy out of Britain, Am I Being Unreasonable doesn’t limit itself to just one brand of toxic relationship; it’s a practical buffet of brokenness. Affairs, obsession, lies, and indifferent parenting form the warp and weft of this tightly plotted dramedy, and each of its six episodes left me gasping… and completely rethinking what I “knew” about the characters and how they all related to one another. While the show packs an astounding amount of relationship drama into every episode, the eye of the gleefully dark shitstorm is the friendship between Nic and Jen. As their lives spin out of control, their bond only grows stronger… which should leave the people around them very, very worried. *** View the full article

Dorothy L Sayers was my gateway author to the world of crime fiction. I’d read the Sherlock Holmes stories earlier on, but that superlatively singular creation of Arthur Conan Doyle did not lead me any further. Holmes was unique, existing in his own universe, and there he remained. Not so with Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey. The Wimsey family motto is “As my Whimsy takes me,” and Sayers’ whimsy took me right through her books and then onto Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, and other authors writing in that great tradition. My Billy Boyle World War II mystery novels are often set in Great Britian, but it is not the Great Britian of the Golden Age of crime fiction. That Golden Age held sway in the interwar years, 1920 – 1939. But even then, characters like Lord Peter and Harriet Vane represented the values and way of life already shattered by the experience of the Great War. Wimsey has his roots firmly in the nineteenth century. He is graceful upon the page, but it is a grace disguising the transcendental impact of the horror in the trenches and the dreadful thinning of the population of men in so many towns and villages across the country. This is exemplified by Lord Peter’s shellshock, on full display in the first book in the series, Whose Body? where we find him firmly in the grip of vivid nightmares. His world has changed, and all the fine manners and proper deportment he can summon will never bring back the bright, golden days before 1914. In one of her short stories, Sayers has Wimsey declare his own epitaph: “Here lies an anachronism in the vague expectation of eternity.” Even given this divide between the universe of Lord Peter Wimsey as created by Sayers and the mid-1940s of Billy Boyle and the Second World War, I’d never given up on the notion of finding some sort of intersection between these two worlds. If not a direct connection, then one at least fueled by elements common to both. A homage that, perhaps, only I would recognize. As I developed the plot for the eighteenth novel in my series, I decided it was time for a change of pace. This entry would be removed from the battlefield and the more exotic locales of the recent books. Since Billy Boyle and friends had never enjoyed any time off, I was overdue to grant them leave. This takes place in the quiet (fictional) village of Slewford in Norfolk, at Seaton Manor, the home of Sir Richard Seaton, father to Billy’s lover, the English spy Diana Seaton. I had to revisit the first book in the series, Billy Boyle, to see where I had originally placed Seaton Manor. For no special reason, I had selected the county of Norfolk, on the east coast of England. Seaton Manor sits near the Wash, a bay and estuary marking a large indentation on the coastline. Tidal forces and shifting sands make the Wash treacherous for those who are unprepared for how fast and swift the tide can come in. As I studied the countryside around the Wash, it seemed oddly familiar. Then it hit me. This is the Fens, or Fenland, the setting for one of Dorothy L Sayers’ finest works—The Nine Tailors. Her fictional village of Fenchurch Saint Paul is located in Cambridgeshire, just over the border from Norfolk and close to the edge of the Wash. The Fens, a huge expanse of reeds and shallow, freshwater lakes, borders the Wash. Beginning in the seventeenth century, landowners began to drain the Fens in order to turn it into fertile farmland. By Lord Peter’s time, long drainage ditches drew water away from the fields and into the Wash. At the beginning of The Nine Tailors, such a ditch—known as the Thirty-Foot Drain—is exactly where we find Lord Peter Wimsey and his sturdy manservant Bunter. “That’s torn it!” said Lord Peter Wimsey. The car lay, helpless and ridiculous, her nose deep in the ditch, her back wheels cocked absurdly up on the bank, as though she were doing her best to bolt to earth, and were scraping herself a burrow beneath the drifted snow . . . right and left, before and behind, the fen lay shrouded. It was past four o’clock and New Year’s Eve; the snow that had fallen all day gave back a glimmering greyness to a sky like lead. Now I had an intersection. My story of interrupted leave at Seaton Manor also hinged upon treacherous waters. My (first) murder victim was also found in a totally unexpected location, as was the dead gent in The Nine Tailors. Also, I was but a short distance not only from the setting of The Nine Tailors but the home turf of Dorothy L Sayers herself. Sayers grew up in Bluntisham, Cambridgeshire, right on the edge of the Fens. From 1917 to 1928, her father was the rector at Christchurch, a tiny Fenland village with a notable Victorian church. Here, she would have become familiar with bell ringing, which forms such an important part of the plot for The Nine Tailors. She also would have understood the danger to people living in the Fens from the power of water and tides. The area is kept dry by a series of sluices and floodgates which, on the occasion of heavy rains and high tide, can overflow and wreak havoc. I already had my own story to tell about treacherous waters and shifting tides. I’d long been fascinated by the Maid of Harlech, which is how locals in Wales refer to an American P-38 Lightning fighter plane that crash-landed just off the coast in 1942. It was only in 2007 that shifting sands and changing tides revealed it, half-buried in the mud. But the sea routinely reclaims it, only to have it appear months later. With Seaton Manor already established on the east coast, using the Maid of Harlech was out. But I did construct a plot about a German bomber that crash-landed in Norfolk and skidded off a cliff into the Wash, only to have the intense tides reveal it two years later, during Billy’s leave, along with its mysterious cargo. Just as the Thirty-Foot Drain played a key role in The Nine Tailors, so do the tides in Proud Sorrows. I could not resist inserting mention of that drain in reference to a local man brought in to hoist the wreckage out of the water. He comes to the task fresh from dredging the Thirty-Foot Drain. It’s near impossible to nail down the locations in The Nine Tailors with any certainty. Sayers establishes a firm sense of place without undue worry over precise locations. When Wimsey and Bunter cross the humpbacked bridge and careen off the road, they are in the vicinity of the Sixteen-Foot Drain (the names refer to the width of the canal). We know this mainly from Sayers’ inclusion of actual pubs in the vicinity such as the Dun Cow and the Red Cow. But she transforms the smaller drain into the Thirty-Foot Drain, a much more seriously dangerous waterway. St. Marys Church, Bluntisham, Cambridgeshire where Dorothy L Sayers spent her early years. The names on some of the gravestones in the churchyard were used in The Nine Tailors. The Reverend Sayers was responsible for beginning a restoration of the church bells at St. Mary’s, which would account for his daughter’s firsthand knowledge of the subject. So, I had my intersection with Dorothy L Sayers. Thin, but enough for me. The Fens, the Wash, high waters, and a dead body in the same general vicinity as the corpse in The Nine Tailors. Subtle, but satisfying. What more could I ask for? As it happens, one Ian Carmichael. My research turned up the fact that the actor who would portray Lord Peter Wimsey on the BBC from 1972 to 1975 had been an officer in the Royal Armoured Corps during WWII. Carmichael served with the 22nd Dragoons, landing on Juno Beach on D-Day and serving in battles across France, Holland, and Germany. The 22nd Dragoons was no ordinary unit. They were equipped with specialized Sherman Crab flail tanks. These tanks were modified with heavy chains ending in fist-size steel balls, or flails, attached to a horizontal rotating rotor mounted on two arms in front of the vehicle. They would clear a path through a minefield by slowly driving and flogging the ground ahead of them, exploding the mines. To be effective, the tanks had to drive at no more than one and a half miles per hour, often in the face of enemy fire. That was how Captain Ian Carmichael spent his war. With that intriguing bit of history tucked up my sleeve, I bring Carmichael onstage. Since the village of Slewford played host to an exclusive POW compound for high-ranking German officers, Captain Carmichael is brought in from the Continent to interrogate a prisoner about German defenses the Dragoons is facing in Holland. He encounters Billy and assists with his investigation, providing yet another Lord Peter intersection. It would be thirty more years before Carmichael would play Lord Peter, on both radio and television programs. But in 1944, he was close to the age Wimsey is at the time of the novels. I had to work at not letting him slip into the aristocratic patter of Lord Peter, reminding myself that Carmichael was an aspiring actor from northern England, the son of an optician, not the Duke of Denver. Still, I did let a bit of Wimsey slip through. After reading Carmichael’s delightfully witty autobiography, Will the Real Ian Carmichael, I tried to adapt his breezy tone. Perhaps it was an affectation he developed over the years, but it fit him so well, I did my best to be true to it. He was great fun to write. Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey. He was often photographed with his left hand in a pocket, having lost the tip of one finger in an encounter with a heavy tank hatch. For those fans of Dorothy L Sayers who prefer Edward Petherbridge as their Wimsey (he starred in several BBC productions during the 1980s), I can only report that he was a mere eight years old in 1944, far too young to have any role in investigating the murders in Slewford. *** View the full article

NOEMI I’d just given the rolling paper a twist when I thought I heard a knock at the door. My eyes shot to the window. Sure enough. He looked confused when I pulled the door open, as if he’d expected someone else. His lips moved. I held up a finger, telling him to wait while I went to lower my music. “You sure like it loud,” he remarked upon my return. “Drowns shit out,” I said. “Lookin’ for my mom?” His lips moved again with no sound coming out. And then he said, “Yeah. And you, too.” I felt my forehead wrinkle, my upper lip coming up as my eyes examined him. Short gray hair that matched the patchy stubble on his chin and cheeks. Heavy lines beneath his eyes. Skin that had yet to see the summer’s sun, though it was already late July. Beneath those new and unfamiliar traits stood a man I hadn’t seen in twelve long years. “Uncle Louie!” I didn’t mean to screech, but my voice has a way of doing that. Like a grasshopper, I leapt at him, wrapping him in a hug that pinned his arms to his sides. I was thrilled to see him, the man who wasn’t just my uncle but the closest thing to a father and a brother I’d ever had. At least, he had been until distance, I guess, got in the way. But before that, he’d always brought me gifts and given me advice—even when I didn’t want it—and he’d practically raised me until the age of five. “Come in! Oh my god, come in.” I yanked him into the trailer he’d once called home. He took two big steps away from me, looking at the TV on the wall, the painted paneling, the leather sofa, the glass end table, the laminate flooring, everything but my eyes. “You didn’t recognize me at first, did you?” I said, immediately wishing I hadn’t. He scratched beneath his collar. “You’re not a kid anymore. You must be for—” “It’s been more than a decade.” I cut him off because I knew what he’d been about to say, and I didn’t want him to think of me that way—forty. I pocketed the joint from the coffee table just as his eyes passed over it. There was nothing I could do about the bong other than hope he took it for a vase. “Putting the per capita payments to good use,” he said with just enough sarcasm to make me think it was a joke. Feeling heat in my cheeks because he’d just discovered one of my vices, and because he didn’t know yet how badly I’d fucked up with my share of money from the casino, I dropped onto the couch, only to bounce right back up. We were both nervous, no question about that. “Did my mom know you were coming?” He shook his head, and I supposed he hadn’t told anyone on the reservation he was coming home. “Wasn’t sure I’d go through with it until the tires left the runway,” he admitted. “She here?” I cocked my head toward the bathroom door. He nodded as if he should have known. With a snap of my fingers and a smile—suddenly remembering—I exclaimed, “The powwow starts tomorrow!” figuring that must explain why he’d chosen now to reappear. He used to visit every summer, proud of the fact that he’d attended every powwow since the year he was born. That streak ended, however, in 2011, the last time he came home. “Yeah.” He nodded again, this time in a way that seemed to reassure him more than me. “Looking forward to it.” “Still teaching?” I snapped a few more times. “What is it?” “Folklore and mythology. Yeah, I’m still teaching. And you? What keeps you busy these days?” I felt my mouth betray me, the corners of my lips sinking toward my chin. Hoping he wouldn’t see, I swung my head to the right, making my waist-length hair wrap around my body as my eyes sought comfort in the delicate magnolia on my exposed shoulder, the pink feather on my forearm, the vibrant butterfly on my wrist. “Just living the dream,” I muttered. The bathroom door opened just then, and I’m sure we were both glad it did. From within, black leather boots, skinny jeans, a black tank top with a rainbow heart bedazzled across the chest, shiny lips, and puffed-up hair emerged. Mom. Her eyes widened. Fear momentarily cracked her made-up face, and a scream of terror in response to the strange man standing in our living room almost rang out, transforming instead into a cry of joy at the last split-second, right when she recognized him. “Louie!” She did a little hop, her boots thumping against the laminate floor. “Don’t do that to me!” A second later, she was in her brother’s arms. “Lula,” he cried. We’d gone years without phone calls, video chats, and greeting cards. Sometimes we’d exchange texts on birthdays and holidays, filled with statements like Hope you’re well, rather than questions that might encourage conversation. Mom looked up at him, taking his face in her hands. “You cut off your hair. It’s gray.” Three years older than him, Mom’s hair has been chocolate cherry my entire life. “Let me turn back time for you.” She laughed. “My god, what are you doing here?” “Powwow,” he said. “I wish you’d have told me. Everyone’s going to be so surprised to see you. But this is perfect!” She clapped her hands. “We’re meeting friends at the Blue Gator tonight. You can meet Noemi’s boyfriend. My new guy’s gonna come by too.” “No he won’t,” I interjected from the couch. Mom threw a dismissive wave in my direction. “Say you’ll come,” Mom said. “Sure. Yeah.” He seemed to reassure himself again. “I’ll meet you there after I check in at the hotel.” “Why not stay here? I know it’s a little small for—” Mom paused, finally looking past her brother. “Where’s Holly? Jill?” “Can we—?” he started, but was cut off by a stern trio of knocks against the door. It wasn’t Holly or Jill. Excerpt continues below cover reveal. “Chief Fisher,” Mom and Uncle Louie said in unison the instant I opened the door. Luke Fisher wasn’t chief of the tribal police anymore, but he had been for so long that most of us still called him that. Most days, he still acted like he was on the job. “Noemi.” His hands reached for mine as his eyes gave Mom an acknowledging glance. They lingered a little longer on Louie, but whatever he’d come to say took precedence over the friendly reunion that might have otherwise occurred. “What is it?” I said. Luke wasn’t the type to just drop in for visits. He wasn’t the type to just stroke the back of your hand either. “Let’s sit,” he said. I didn’t want to. “It’s Roddy.” He uttered. “I know how close the two of you are, so I thought I should tell you before—” “Tell me what?” His old hands, veins stretching the thin skin, squeezed mine. “He was hit by a car. A Jeep.” “What?” I shrieked. Mom did too. Luke glanced at the sofa, but I hadn’t changed my mind about sitting. “I’m really sorry.” Sorry. I’d never known how much weight a word could hold until Luke uttered it. “No!” Tears appeared as if a magician had waved a wand in front of my eyes. “Tribal P.D. will figure out what happened.” “You’re saying…?” Though I heard what he was saying, I couldn’t grasp it. Didn’t want to. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “How?” “He was out on Grand Nacre Drive. The driver said he came out of nowhere.” That didn’t make sense. I’d texted Roddy a couple hours earlier, confirming our plans for the night. He was going to pick me up at eight. I told Luke as such. “He didn’t say anything about driving anywhere else.” “He wasn’t driving. He was on foot.” That made even less sense. “Roddy doesn’t walk, especially in the summer.” There were only two reasons to be along Grand Nacre Drive: to get to the casino, or to leave it. “Was he at the casino?” I asked, knowing he had no reason to go there. Luke’s shoulders hitched. “There’s a lot to figure out.” I pulled my hands away from his and braced myself against the wall. Reality wasn’t yet registering, but I knew what I’d lose if I lost Roddy. Hopes, dreams, second chances. Without him, all I’d have were memories, regret, and forty years in the rearview mirror. Mom told me the years would go fast, back in my twenties when $130k—the amount of my trust fund, thanks to years of per capita payments I couldn’t touch until I turned twenty-one—seemed like a million bucks. And Mom was right, the years came and went like sparks. And, like the money, I’d wasted them all. “When?” I asked Luke. “About an hour ago.” I looked out the window. The sun was below the horizon. All that remained of its light was a fiery orange band like the ring around a lit cigarette. “It must have been light when the accident happened.” Anger rose within me. “Was the driver drunk?” “Noemi…” Luke threw his head back and cupped his brow. I’d never seen him so unsettled. “It might not have been the driver’s fault.” “He’s blaming Roddy?” “She’s saying…” Eyes clenched tight, he slowly exhaled and then, finally looking like the authority he’d always been, his arms fell to his sides and he gave it to me straight. “The driver said Roddy lunged in front of her vehicle. You’ve already said yourself that Roddy didn’t like to walk and that he hadn’t mentioned going anywhere today. There’s concern”—his voice softened—“that this could have been suicide.” “What?!” I shrieked again. “No fucking way. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. We had plans. We were gonna get out of here. We were gonna get tattoos!” “There’s a lot to figure out,” he repeated. “What exactly did the driver say about Roddy?” Uncle Louie asked, stepping closer to Luke. “According to her, he jumped in front of the Jeep.” “He wouldn’t!” I insisted. “With the way word travels around here, I might as well tell you everything.” Luke exhaled another deep breath. “The driver ran for help. When she returned to Roddy, she said there was a coyote over his body…with blood around its mouth.” My stomach churned. I finally sat. Mom plopped beside me, wrapping me in her arms, while Uncle Louie, paler than before, inexplicably locked the door. __________________________________ Excerpted from Indian Burial Ground by Nick Medina Copyright © 2024 by Nick Medina. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. View the full article

When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid finally came to my boyhood mall, I saw it three times, wondering in the dark about the unnamed lawmen chasing the Wild Bunch outlaws around the West, the drumbeat of their horses’ hooves drawing Butch’s exasperated line, “Who are those guys?” One who chased the gang, I would learn, was a cowboy detective named Charles Siringo, who logged four years and 25,000 miles in pursuit. The film’s relentless riders can seem symbolic –standing for time running out on Butch and Sundance and their outlaw era or for the forces then changing the West itself. But it was for the pleasure of following along with one of the gang’s hunters, Siringo, that I later wrote Son of The Old West. I knew a couple of the Siringo books, but did not become interested in his story until I was researching a project on Dashiell Hammett’s transition from young Pinkerton operative to crime writer, The Lost Detective, in the Pinkerton archive at the Library of Congress. The Pinkerton archive is a self-selected trove of wanted posters, cypher code books, operative reports, forensic drawings, and crime scene photos. The Pinkertons donated it primarily to highlight some of their earlier triumphs and counter their later reputation for anti-union work. It is a fantastic collection, no matter its original purpose. The name Dashiell Hammett did not appear in those Pinkerton files. But that of Charles Siringo repeatedly did, both for his heroics infiltrating the Wild Bunch and other desperado gangs but also in the agency’s repeated lawsuits to squelch the books Siringo kept publishing about his undercover adventures. There were several files devoted to Pinkerton’s court cases against him, yet he kept telling his story in the face of ruinous lawsuits, as if his life was too interesting not to write about, no matter what contract he had once signed. His stubbornness was intriguing. I copied much of the Siringo Pinkerton materials, and later, when the Library of Congress shut down for the pandemic, had a stash of research squirreled away. Siringo’s story illustrates the history of the Old West he saw, from the cattle trail days and the birth of the railway cow town to outlaw times and early Hollywood; encountering everyone from the southwestern outlaw Billy the Kid to Comanche leader Quanah Parker, even brawling with Buffalo hunters one night in Bat Masterson’s Dodge City saloon. Because he spent two decades undercover, playing rough frontier types, outdrinking and outwitting the criminals he befriended and betrayed, Siringo’s actual character has not become fixed in the popular mind. He went everywhere in the West, but often under different names. So who was he? Cowboy Born in Matagorda, Texas in 1855, Charlie was already an author when he signed with the Pinkertons. The year he turned thirty, he published A Texas Cowboy: Or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony (1885), about the life he had just left behind and the open range that was disappearing behind barbed wire. He had never written a book before. In fact, no cowboy had published an autobiography; their literature did not yet exist. It is by far his freest and most joyful work to read, and ends with Charlie giving up the cowboy life, donning “a pair of suspenders, the first I had ever worn” and becoming a Kansas merchant: Thus one cow-puncher takes a sensible tumble and drops out of the ranks. Now, dear reader in bidding you adieu, I will say: Should you not be pleased with the substance of this book, I’ve got nothing to say in defense, as I gave you the best I had in my little shop… Published the same year as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which fashioned a national literature out of American dialect, Siringo’s book committed frontier speech and cowboy culture to the written page. Will Rogers would call it the “Cowboy’s bible.” Siringo improved some true events he had not seen first-hand, such as claiming to sneak aboard the steamboat Robert E. Lee in time for its famous race against the Natchez in the summer of 1870; or, despite being in the next town, giving a cinematic description of the lynching of city marshal Henry Brown (whom he knew was at heart an outlaw) after he failed to rob the Medicine Lodge Bank in 1884. But Charlie tells it straight when it comes to events like getting shot himself, fired upon by a hired gunman in April 1875: while he was smoking by the fire of his skinning camp one evening near Cashs Creek in Matagorda County, Sam Grant, a Black cowboy and sometime killer, rode up, aimed his Colt Dragoon at Siringo’s heart, and pulled the trigger. Sitting with his leg still drawn up, level with his heart, the pistol ball entered Charlie’s kneecap instead of his chest. A Black cowhand friend known as Lige came riding suddenly through the trees, and Grant pretended to have fired by accident, then rode off, pledging to send back the doctor from miles away at Deming’s Bridge. Dr. A. M. Pelton was able to reach him by sunrise to remove the ball, and save Siringo’s knee. In Hollywood decades later, the retired physician read an article about Charlie in the Los Angeles Times and invited him for a reunion, where they reminisced about Pelton’s removing the ball. (Siringo inscribed his thanks in a copy of one of his books that recently turned up online: “To my dear old-time friend, Dr. A.M. Pelton, the surgeon who rode 25 miles between midnight and daylight…to cut a bullet out of my body…”) Detective A blind old phrenologist had once laid his hands on Charlie’s skull in a hotel lobby in Caldwell, Kansas, pronouncing him fit only to be a stock rancher, newspaper editor, or detective. But it was only after moving his family from Kansas to Chicago in 1886 that Siringo joined Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, driven to fight anarchists, he said, by the city’s Haymarket bombings. The company sent him to its new Denver office to become a cowboy detective on dozens of missions across the West—a bold and chatty little mustached Texan, with cowboy skills to match his gift for making friends, drinking with rough characters or flirting with the sisters and girlfriends of wanted men to learn their whereabouts. On the wide-ranging Wild Bunch hunt, he would romance both the Mormon sister of Butch Cassidy and Lonnie Logan’s common-law wife, Ellie, reading her letters and learning “all of her secrets.” Entering each troubled town asking the agency’s help, Charlie’s favorite role was the cowboy fleeing mysterious trouble, buying rounds to seal desperado friendships: In Fairplay [Co.], two tough dance-halls were running, and night was turned to day by the tough element. Of course, I joined them, and I was to play the part of a Texas outlaw. In his undercover stories, Charlie would arrive at a stranger’s ranch and offer to break his meanest bronc, knowing the spectacle might bring a crowd including the wanted man thought to be hiding on the premises; or he would gentle the skittish horse of a criminal he was trying to befriend in town. Such seemingly implausible tales were well within Charlie’s skill set, as shown when he competed in a cowboy contest in Denver in 1887, combining his old cowboy life with his sleuthing profession while appearing under his sometime literary alias, ‘Dull Knife’: Charlie was not going to miss out on a cowboy contest in the town where he lived as a detective, even if he had to compete as someone else, and the Rocky Mountain News noted that ‘Dull Knife’ in his sombrero was “such a perfect and graceful type of a Texan cowboy that the audience gave one spontaneous A-h-h-h! of admiration.” A dramatic train robbery of the Union Pacific railway near Wilcox, Wyoming, on June 2, 1899, inspired William Pinkerton to dispatch his two best cowboy detectives, W.O. “Billy” Sayles and his sometime partner Siringo, on a quest that lasted much of four years and ranged all over the West. Members of the train robbing gang, which included Butch Cassidy, Ben “Tall Texan” Kilpatrick, Harvey Logan (‘Kid Curry’), George ‘News’ Carver, and Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid), hit the UP railway again the following year at Tipton, Wyoming. Just as in the famous movie, they were met by the same brave express messenger who had survived their dynamiting of his rail car at Wilcox, George Woodcock, who this time listened to reason and emerged just before they blew the safe. After the Tipton robbery, Charlie rode out to interview the owner of a haystack in southern Utah, where Kid Curry and some comrades from the Union Pacific robbery had slept. Then he “drifted over to Indian Creek, a place noted for tough characters, and got in solid with an outlaw named ‘Peg Leg.’” In Utah’s San Juan County, ‘Peg Leg’ showed him “a high mountain ridge” from which he could see much of the landscape of the Wild Bunch. He eventually followed the gang to Alma, New Mexico, where Butch Cassidy and others worked on a ranch under assumed names; he visited the Alma saloon where Butch also tended bar as ‘Jim Lowe,’ but Butch had skipped town and ultimately fled the country with the Sundance Kid, dying together under Bolivian soldiers’ bullets in 1908. Click to view slideshow. After two decades learning about “human nature” as a Pinkerton, Charlie retired in 1907, beginning work on what became A Cowboy Detective, “an autobiography of many thrilling adventures, on mountain and plain, among moonshiners, cattle thieves, tramps, dynamiters, and strong-arm men.” His manuscript quickly attracted the attention of the agency’s lawyers; especially the sections where he named clients and revealed company methods. A box at the Library of Congress holds a galley for what was called A Pinkerton’s Cowboy Detective: A True Story of Twenty-Two Years with Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, marked up with blue pencil, underlining the many passages found objectionable by the agency in seeking an injunction against its author. The Pinkertons held up publication for two years with legal challenges redacting and replacing names, even the word ‘Pinkerton’ ultimately became ‘Dickenson.’ (A number of the book’s aliases have made their way into Western history books.) Despite its changes, the book remained authentic enough to influence hard-boiled writers: The body was in good shape, with the exception of the right hand being cut off. The hand was never found, and here hangs a tale. A Cowboy Detective inspired Dashiell Hammett in writing his 1925 crime story “Corkscrew,” in which his stocky urban Continental Op is sent to investigate some murders of Arizona cowboys and is thrown repeatedly from a devilish horse to gain acceptance. (The Op, a city man, asks the cowboys for a mild mount and of course receives the opposite, proving his worth by gamely taking his beating being thrown.) If the hard-boiled American detective fiction of the 1920s was largely the classic cowboy story adapted to a city setting, then Siringo had carried it there from the Texas plains. Certainly he would have recognized the Western world of Hammett’s novel Red Harvest, with its Montana mining town that’s part Butte, part Anaconda. As a detective, Charlie had entered many towns held hostage by thuggish elements and was often saved by his cowboy training; he wrote about both lives, bridging one to the other. Wild as they sometimes seem, Siringo’s detecting narratives were often delivered under oath in court. To investigate a dynamiting ring in Tuscarora, Nevada, he was hired in a San Francisco hotel by one of the survivors from an explosion in April 1889: two executives from the Price and Peltier mining corporation had just retired for the night to their separate cabins in the mining camp of Tuscarora when they suffered simultaneous bombings. Long fuses were lit that touched off blasting powder beneath each of their beds, blowing the men through their own roofs. George Peltier had been tucked in his blankets before the bomb threw him into the air, landing on his mattress in the street, and was able to recover surprisingly quickly. But C. W. Price had not been as well tucked when the charge went off, and landed hard on the roadbed, his wounds considerable. Siringo went to work at the mine and befriended a dynamiting suspect among the miners whom he brought on an epic prospecting trip into the Wichita Mountains until he confessed his crime one night beneath the stars. During the mining wars in the Coeur d’Alenes, Siringo secured a job in Gem, Idaho as a union recording secretary until his cover as C. Leon Allison was blown, in July 1891. A mob of angry miners next came for him at his boarding house, where Siringo hid beneath the floorboards of the first floor, then crawled toward the street, inching along on his belly under the wooden boardwalk where the armed mob was waiting. After his dangerous months as a miner he returned wearing a sharp suit to a Boise courthouse in 1892, his testimony convincing enough that the defense chose not to cross-examine. Siringo later claimed to regret his anti-union work, but remained proud to the end of his crawl to freedom. After his boarding house later burned down, it pained him to know “the hole sawed in the floor went up in smoke” and could not be “handed down to my grandchildren as a relic…” Hollywood There was a price for living so long among outlaws. Debt and failing health finally forced him to give up his ranch outside Santa Fe and resettle in Los Angeles in 1923. Moving to a bungalow in Hollywood, he sold his books out of a satchel and fell in with a group of admiring Western writers and film people, including the silent film star William S. Hart, who hired him to advise on his final movie, Tumbleweeds, in which Charlie appeared briefly in a saloon based on his own recollections of Caldwell, Kansas. One of Siringo’s literary friends recommended him to his own publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which agreed to publish a last memoir, covering the ground of Siringo’s earlier Western books, without masking names. Riata & Spurs received a terrific reception from newspapers across the country in 1927, one calling him “Ulysses of the Wild West.” But Pinkerton’s lawyers were ready once again: finding themselves under legal attack, his Houghton editors removed scores of pages of his Pinkerton adventures. (The book’s short-lived first edition contains the real names changed or excised from A Cowboy Detective, and surviving copies make a useful key for reading his other books.) Siringo died the next year, 1928, and was buried in Hollywood. Asked once as an old man if he had led a brave life, he answered simply, “I was a plain damn fool, that’s all.” Charlie was never a gunfighter, yet in Western dramas since his death he often appears (played by Steve Forrest, Dennis Farina, or Cole Hauser) as a gun-happy manhunter, embodying the notoriety of his longtime employer, Pinkerton’s. In the Arthur Penn Western The Missouri Breaks (1976), a Montana horse rustler played by Jack Nicholson nervously robs a train, boasting to the express agent that he is Jesse James himself. “You ain’t Jesse James,” sneers the agent, and Nicholson answers, “Well, you ain’t Charlie Siringo.” *** Son of the Old West was written largely during the pandemic: as people brought puppies home to lift their spirits, a 165-year-old bowlegged stranger moved into our house, along with all his books, clanking around and talking mainly about himself and his favorite horses; showing off his ‘old Colts 45’ or snaring bed posts with long tosses of his riata; while also spinning charming, if sometimes contradictory yarns about the frontier he had known. It is a pleasure finally to send him back out on the trail he loved. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen King, Holly (Scribner) “A tour de force. Creepy as hell but full of heart, too.” –Linwood Barclay Craig Johnson, The Longmire Defense (Viking) “[A] standout . . . The whodunit, which presents a dizzying number of red herrings, is one of Johnson’s trickiest, keeping readers deliciously off-balance throughout. Series newcomers will have no problem jumping into the action, and longtime readers will relish the dive into Longmire’s family history.” –Publishers Weekly Kaira Rouda, Beneath the Surface (Thomas & Mercer) “When the wealthy patriarch of a family business invites his children on a trip from Newport Beach to Catalina Island aboard his new yacht, Rouda fans will know to buckle their seat belts…. King Lear goes to the beach. Yes.” –Kirkus Reviews Sarah Bonner, Her Sweet Revenge (Grand Central) “A twisty novel, where nothing is to be believed, no one is to be trusted, and more turns that you can keep track up. This is the second novel from author Sarah Bonner, and it’s another home run, you will need a scorecard to keep track. Fans of psychological thrillers will eat this one up.” –RedCarpetCrash.com Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Square of Sevens (Atria) “A reminder that Laura Shepherd-Robinson is riding high in the historical crime stakes….a sprawling epic novel.” –Financial Times Lauren Muñoz, Suddenly a Murder (Putnam Young Readers) “Alongside the central mystery, the author successfully explores a host of serious issues, including substance abuse, risky sexual behavior, and the armor of socioeconomic privilege…. An un-put-down-able, bittersweet whodunit.” –Kirkus Reviews Jilly Gagnon, Scenes of the Crime (Bantam) “The Gothic setting of Jilly Gagnon’s Scenes of the Crime—an isolated, exclusive winery on the Oregon coast—provides the perfect backdrop for this absorbing, meta-fictional variation on a locked-room mystery, full of pointed observations about class, money, and the inherent competition that lies beneath many female friendships…” –Joanna Margaret Yasmin Angoe, It Ends with Knight (Thomas & Mercer) “Watch your back, Liam Neeson. This avenger is tough.” –Kirkus Reviews James R. Benn, Proud Sorrows (Soho) “Masterful . . . Benn combines the best elements of traditional small-town mysteries and WWII thrillers, developing a firm sense of place and never letting the suspense flag. This long-running series shows no signs of fatigue.” –Publishers Weekly Melanie Golding, The Sight (Crooked Lane) “Shattering . . . A fairy tale–tinged thriller.” —Kirkus Reviews View the full article

There’s something fascinating about horror. The darkness that hides darker monsters. The creaks and gore and jump scares. The jokes. The unearthing of fears. Whenever I’m in the mood for a campy, scary movie, I’ll go for a man-eating shark or a haunted house, or any of the Scream movies. For the longest time, it didn’t matter what movie I watched, if there were Black people in the film, they were usually the first to die, quickly and mercilessly dispatched and with dramatic effect. It became a well-known horror trope and running joke. Deep Blue Sea was one of the first movies I saw where a Black person, LL Cool J, makes it to the end of the movie (and a shark movie at that) without becoming fish food. Movies like Deep Blue Sea marked a subtle push against a genre historically centered on whiteness. Many of our favorite cult classics were created by white men and center masculinity in a dominant social structure, which has led to a stubborn gatekeeping that has remained at the forefront of the genre, both on screen and in modern literature. Contemporary horror highlights a shift to include more women and nonbinary writers and authors of color, who are breaking through the traditional models and subverting the horror genre in delightful ways. There is a decentralizing of whiteness which has given breath to more stories that answer the question: What are you afraid of? Modern Black horror turns the mirror inward, putting the lens on societal dread and the monsters hidden in plain sight. It asks the reader to think critically and to reexamine the world from a different perspective. It is inclusive, acknowledging horror stories outside the Western gaze and more importantly, Black horror considers the humanity of its characters and who gets to survive and triumph. Shark movies, things that go bump in the night, haunted houses, and aliens who invade from space all make for good horror–this fear is universal. But what about the kinds of fear that strike at the heart of members of a minority community? For Black people, some fears are primal, because the probability of certain scenarios playing out in real life aren’t that farfetched at all. Buying candy at a corner store and being stalked by a self-appointed vigilante, seeing the flashing red and blue lights of a police cruiser in the rearview mirror, or being murdered at home because of a botched execution of a no-knock warrant, this is horror too. Black creators are using social horror as a vehicle to tell stories that confront racism in all its insidious ways. We are uniquely positioned to observe and reflect on the dangers of existing in this unfavorable power dynamic. Black horror in the same way, cuts through the euphemisms and examines the everyday psychological trauma that people who look like me experience while chumming the waters of a dominant, supremacist culture. What I love most about Black horror is that it doesn’t always have to be serious. Its function isn’t limited to resuscitating and poking at trauma but also to give us a chance to laugh at ourselves, while exploring and defining the spectrum of Blackness on its own terms. Heavy issues can be unpacked with hilarity and satire. The movie The Blackening is hands-down the funniest horror I’ve seen this year. The majority Black cast and its genius tagline “We Can’t All Die First” taps into a certain Black consciousness with its satirical take on our culture and takedown of racist horror tropes. In my debut novel, There’s No Way I’d Die First, I turn the lens inward on white liberalism and how despite its commitment to dismantling inequality and white supremacy, can be performative and perpetuate harmful ideologies rooted in stereotypes and classism. Noelle, the main character, is a teen girl whose parents have managed to get past social barriers and established themselves as successful Black businesspeople in America. However, they make sure Noelle knows that wealth and the passing down of generational wealth looks different for Black people. As a horror movie buff, Noelle observes that Final Girls have always been white, and Black girls have always had to save themselves. In this era of Black Final Girls in YA fiction, they are changing and disrupting the horror aesthetic. There is a long-overdue, unraveling of pejorative perceptions when it comes to Black people in horror. As an author of Barbadian descent, living in a multicultural city, I am writing experiences into these stories in a way that is nuanced and layered. I am asking important questions before I put pen to the page: who is this art for, and what is it supposed to do? I am centering voices who have historically been relegated to the margins (and meat hooks) in horror. As an author, I can give my characters agency by celebrating the messy Black girls, the ones who have it all together, and those still figuring things out. I can have them face down monsters (human or otherwise) and fight back on their own terms beyond their racial marginalization. I can have them survive. In There’s No Way I’d Die First, the Black protagonist stands in the spotlight, flaws and all. She claims a survivorship that has always been there but is now going mainstream with the broadening of Black representation in YA horror. Noelle’s favorite movie of all time is Get Out because it ushered in a seismic shift in the genre and set a new standard. If Black horror is a social and cultural commentary of the Black experience, then it must also include the unpacking of racial terrors and the perpetrators of this violence. Racism and any kind of bigotry is a horror and should be treated as such. In telling these types of stories, Black pain is unequivocally unavoidable, and the genre must balance the slippery slope of daring to tell ugly truths and exploiting Black fears for entertainment. However, Black authors should not be limited to telling a single story of the profundity of racial violence. We are free to imagine and delve into other aspects of the Black experience and explore diasporic stories that challenge genre borders. There is room for all types of horror stories. There’s No Way I’d Die First casts a critical light on society, wealth, and privilege. I wanted a Black Final Girl to be the last one standing after facing down a monster of society’s making. A key question as I drafted was: how do I consider authorial intent and engage with horror as a medium for processing fears and trauma while engaging with real life horror in the news and daily life? Black horror is emerging from its invisibility and perceived unattractiveness to take center stage. I’m thrilled to see so many horror books written by Black authors thriving in literary spaces. This should go without saying, but Black protagonists are as deserving of empathy as anyone else. They must be allowed the full breadth of their humanity—to be complex and messy, to giggle and cry, to go to hell and back and live to talk about it. *** View the full article

Have you ever seen those Progressive Insurance commercials about becoming your parents? Would you be surprised if I told you they inspired a horror novel? Specifically, my new novel BLACK SHEEP. It wasn’t so much the commercials themselves that got me thinking, but the message behind them. Are we destined to become our parents? Can we ever truly separate ourselves from the people and the environment we were raised in? Sever blood ties? It’s terrifying to wonder how much of ourselves is ours, and how much is determined by DNA. Who among us has not asked ourselves at one point or another (on Thanksgiving, always Thanksgiving) “Who the hell am I related to?” But the horror genre is happy to remind us not all dysfunctional families are created equally. All happy families are alike; every horror family is horrific in its own way. Let’s start with the Graham family, of Ari Aster’s 2018 film Hereditary. Imagine your mother, Annie, is a miniature artist. There’s already a lot going on there. Your dad is Steve, you have a teenage brother, Peter, and a sister Charlie. Your weird grandma has recently passed on, and your already weird home life is about to get weirder. Because turns out grandma was a cult-queen demon-worshipper! And though she may be gone, the rest of her coven isn’t. There’s no giving a polite “no thanks” to the occult. There’s only so much we can do to separate ourselves from our legacies. If you were a Graham, you may choose to skip coming home for the holidays, but not sure opting out of possession is really a possibility. But at least Annie and Steve are generally decent people who attempt to be decent parents. What if your mother wasn’t Annie, but Margaret White of Stephen King’s Carrie, quick to accuse you of sin and lock you in the closet. A mother who constantly shames you for existing in body and calls your breasts “dirty pillows.” Or Norma Bates of Psycho, overbearing even after her death. A mother who created a harmful, codependent relationship, who is mean and controlling and honestly just pretty annoying overall. There’s a long list of epically bad moms in the horror genre, and I think it’s because of how scary it is to reconcile that the person meant to be your caretaker can be your tormentor. And then there are the horror daddies. What if your father was Jack Torrance of King’s The Shining, who lets his demons, figurative and literal, get the best of him. The quick pitch of living in a hotel for the winter sounds appealing, especially for a kid, but not if it ends in daddy trying to murder you. Not only that, but through dad, you’ve also inherited a supernatural psychic ability that allows you to see ghosts and have terrifying visions. Not for nothing, I’d take my genetic thyroid issues over the shining. Or what about The Omen. I know Damien is not the most sympathetic character, but what if your dad was Satan? Damien didn’t really have any choice in the matter, did he? Neither did Adrian of Rosemary’s Baby, who we know at the very least inherited his father’s eyes. We don’t get to pick our parents, it’s truly the luck of the draw. We can try our best to forge our own paths, but is it inevitable those paths lead back home? All that said, you could do worse than Margaret and Norma, than Jack and Lucifer. You could have been born into the Sawyer family of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or the Jupiter family of The Hills Have Eyes. Imagine that’s the gene pool you were swimming in, one with a whole lot of murder and cannibalism. What if the ugly sweater your aunt gave you for your birthday was made of human skin? The question of nature vs. nurture gets a little more complicated in the context of these families. Were all these people inherently evil, or were they born into an environment that made it near-impossible not to be? I don’t know the answer. That’s part of the reason why I wrote BLACK SHEEP, to explore these questions and complex family dynamics. Even if there’s valid reason to be estranged from your family—whether it’s because they’re murderous hill people or skin-wearing cannibals or demon-adjacent, or because they’re cruel or callous or their beliefs don’t align with yours—it doesn’t make it any less painful to walk away. Heredity’s Annie Graham was estranged from her mother. When she discusses their relationship with a grief support group after her mother’s death, Annie reveals her mother had a difficult life. Her husband, Annie’s father, and son, Annie’s brother, both died by suicide. This is perhaps an attempt on Annie’s part to justify her mother’s behavior to better understand or cope with the trauma of her upbringing. But there was also blame. Annie held resentment toward her mother, who she calls manipulative, and in turn worries about blame and resentment from her own family. She grapples with guilt, though acknowledges her mother never experienced any. Her mother wasn’t capable of taking accountability for anything, leaving that burden on Annie. In spite of all that, Annie admits she loved her mother. In Doctor Sleep, King’s sequel to The Shining, an adult Dan Torrance struggles with anger and alcoholism, just like his father before him. He eventually gets himself sober, but the alcohol was a tool to help him suppress his childhood trauma and his psychic abilities, a tool he now no longer has. Though Jack has been out of Dan’s life for decades, his presence still looms, proving sometimes the scariest ghosts aren’t strangers, but the ones we know best. There’s no shame in creating boundaries and deciding that maybe the families we were born to aren’t ones we need to belong to. And frankly, I think there can be catharsis in the horrors of somebody else’s bad family. It can maybe help us gauge our feelings about our own. Because hey, no family is perfect. We inherit what we inherit, and let’s just cross our fingers it’s good cholesterol and not Paimon. And as for becoming our parents, we do have control over that. But please take your shoes off before you come in the house. *** View the full article

The following are major pre-event assignments, readings, and guides (not including Part IV - Algonkian Novel Development Program) for Algonkian events, many of which are found on our NWOE sister site. Downloading, forwarding, or copying these assignments without the prior approval of Algonkian Writer Conferences is not permitted, however, routine utilization of the content in its extant form is permitted. Parts I, II, and II Pre-Event (includes eBook) Execution of the Pitch Model Assignment Recap and Dramatic Act Structure The Necessity of Publisher's Marketplace Prep for Agent Query Process NOTE: this is an information forum, not a response forum. Utilize the appropriate forums for posting necessary responses. _____________________________________ PART I Pre-event as follows. Part I of four parts. First, a seven short assignments forum that will persuade you to consider several crucial and foundational aspects of your commercial novel project. Consider them as a primer. Complete at your convenience and post the responses. Your responses to these assignments will be reviewed by faculty with an aim towards achieving a better understanding of your project and its current stage of development. NOTE: We recommend writing down the answers in a separate file and then copying them into the forum to prevent any possible loss of data. ____________ PART II The second instance of pre-event necessity as follows. Read carefully and complete in the proper order as noted. You might become a bit astonished from time to time but push through. It all makes perfect sense. Now comes the kindle eBook, or if you prefer, the same booklet found here as a PDF. In either case, you must faithfully absorb everything beginning with the first chapter, “Writer Ego and the Imaginary Bob,” and continue through “Settings are 60%.” This is vital to your potential success. It places emphasis on all the crucial core elements of novel development and editing that *will* be discussed in formal sessions. If you arrive at an Algonkian event not knowing the difference between a plot point and a pinch point, you will be swimming upstream from the first day and thereby seriously disadvantage yourself. Avoiding the study of proper technique won’t get novels published much less developed in a manner both artful and professional. Okay, much to do! Is it ever enough? No, but don’t recoil or hesitate if portions of the e-Book fail to comport with what you’ve been told elsewhere (writer groups, conferences, chat boards, etc.) because the odds are extremely high that what you’ve been told is wrong, if not potentially ruinous. Keep in mind, we all stand on the shoulders of those magnificent and capable authors who’ve preceded us. And remember too, there are no great writers, only great rewriters. ____________ PART III Quite often, after scoring well in a pitch session, the faculty person will ask us, “But can they write?” Premise and plot prod the necessary attention, but so many writers don’t cross the line because their actual prose narrative is not as competitive as it should be. Fact. In response to this circumstance we’ve created an online forum that serves two purposes. First, to demonstrate the best methods and techniques that should rightfully be considered when it comes to the creation of competitive narrative regardless of genre. Second, to act as a place where editors and agents will see the quality of your work up close. Use one of the two links above to get started asap. Simply open the topic linked above, read the guidelines and all the examples linked to Novel Writing on Edge, then edit your own opening hook accordingly. Once done, post at least 500 words by replying to the topic post. If you cannot include first pages at this time another good sample will suffice. Btw, you should already have an Author Connect member login if you’ve opened and utilized the Part I assignment (Seven Assignments). If you have not, please do so at the first opportunity. ___________ Execution of the Pitch Model Like so many other things, this is crucial to your success. Before you can sell a viable commercial novel to a publishing house, you must work towards the goal of writing a viable commercial novel while simultaneously learning how to artfully pitch it. You will have a minute to deliver the actual pitch, and if you think this is not enough time, think again. It is more than enough. The idea is to communicate clearly and hook your listener. Your pitch must include a SCENE SET (as necessary), a focus on your PROTAGONIST (tell it through their point of view), sufficient PLOT TENSION deriving from a PLOT POINT (an event/circumstance/action that significantly changes the course of the story), and finally, a wrap with a CLIFFHANGER. So what's a cliffhanger? Regardless of the genre, literary or thriller or SF, the cliffhanger begs the ultimate question, and it’s always the same in one way or another: WILL BECKY SAVE THE FARM AND LIVE TO TELL THE STORY? Once done, you want the conference editor or agent to ask for more. Please review the following guidance at Novel Writing on Edge where you’ll find two pitch models and further elaboration. You will be using this model at the Algonkian event: https://www.novelwritingonedge.com/2013/11/algonkian-writers-conference-first-prep.html _____________ Assignment Recap and Dramatic Act Structure By this time, you should have in your possession three main assignment mails, namely, Part I (Seven Assignments), Part II (Development eBook), and Part III (Prose Narrative Enhancement). These assignments serve two purposes: to enable you to conceive and write a more perfect novel, one that might actually sell; and secondly, to instill within you with a language and knowledge base that will make meetings with publishing and tv/film professionals far more productive. Now, the following statement should sound familiar. If a member of the faculty asks you to define your first major plot point, inciting incident, or last major reversal before climax, you must comprehend the nature of these plot elements (for starters!), and deliver the response in a manner that demonstrates you are a professional. Amateurs *always* stick out, and they say “um” a lot, thereby failing to live up to our motto: From the heart, but smart. Besides displaying a high concept premise, the faculty also expect your genre or upmarket tale to be creatively developed using a certain approach and structure—one also utilized by screenplay writers—namely, the dramatic act structure. Whether the novel is a single, coherent plot line, or a parallel plot line with two major protagonists, the overall story progression manifests a readily identifiable endoskeleton, so to speak, i.e., an array of familiar points and notes along a story arc from beginning to end. There is more than one version of this, but they all achieve pretty much the same results: the Three Act, Nine Act, and the Six Act Two-Goal. A very good example can be found here. The above is included with your assignments and its importance cannot be over stressed. One of THE biggest reasons novels by unpublished writers fail is because the author is not sufficiently adept at plotting. A novel with a great start but a “saggy middle” always results from an inadequate understanding of how plot must work in order to satisfy the needs and expectations of readers, agents, and editors. Quite often, writers will bring stories and pitches to the NY event that are nothing other than circumstances, sets, and characters mixed into a quasi-amorphous stew, whirlpooled into forced fusion like fragments of a television season. A sign this is the case can almost always be found in the pitch itself. Acquisition editors, experienced agents, and other professionals usually don’t expect to get much traction out of the usual writer conference, but our events always surprise them. We mean to keep it that way. Our reps are on the line, and the better you look, the better we look. The more subs requested, the more contracts cut, the more willing our faculty are likely to return. No question. We also love the publicity and energy generated when the contracts flow. Btw, if the information above doesn’t square with what you’ve been told up until now, then choose the wise path of change. Rewrite as necessary. _________________ The Necessity of Publisher's Marketplace You are well advised to join Publisher’s Marketplace. Why? Because it lists recent sales by agents to publishers broken down by genre and provides a neat story-hook line (log line) for each sale that serves as a potential model for you. PM shows precisely what type of work is now being published in your chosen genre, thereby providing a comparison for your own work, and as a bonus, you learn the identities of productive “in the loop” agents (good to know regardless of circumstances). All in all, if commercial publication is your goal, PM is invaluable. The search feature is efficient and fairly straightforward. Membership is around $20 per month, but well worth it. The type of knowledge PM provides will give you a distinct edge over the competition. _________________ Prep for Querying Agents Though addressing the query-agent stage of your long, hard slog to becoming a published author might seem premature at this point, questions concerning this process nevertheless always arise at Algonkian events. Rather than await the next round of probes on this matter, we’ve decided to link you to the article below. It succinctly covers the critical prep steps you must take prior to sending anything like a query to a commercial agent (if and when it comes to that). Also, it effectively overrides the usual incomplete and/or foolish advice on this matter which currently infects the Internet like an electronic pox. With these answers already in hand, further questions at the conference, in theory, should be more informed, and therefore, the answers more productive. ____________________________________

Beware.

Love ya, Richard!

These bullets of advice for writers in all genres were taken from a review of the SFF author Brandon Sanderson on the video forum and they're worth repeating here for emphasis: The concept of "borrowing" or getting story ideas, entire structure, or themes from other books or films can't hurt and might actually lead to publication; but I maintain you step carefully. The concept may already be overdone, a stale trope. His advised method of transposing the "structure" of one type of genre novel onto another can be productive--reminiscent of Italian writers in the old days transposing Japanese samurai scripts into spaghetti westerns. Another good example is the transposing of BATTLE ROYALE into THE HUNGER GAMES (different genre? debatable). Helpful to note plot points and/or scenes that successful stories have in common. Concept of "interviewing" your character to learn about them, is a very good one. Ask them questions, get in their heads, role play. Asking what character wants and needs, and how they're different. Careful with choice of primary protagonist viewpoint. The story needs to be personal to the viewpoint character. Partitioning a novel into three basic part: PROMISE, PROGRESS, PAYOFF. Yes, very basic, but helpful for new writers. Finally, his idea for "mind priming" before you hit the paper is a good one, e.g., you consider the ways in which you can make an important scene very visual and thrilling, and you roll it around in your head like a lozenge under the tongue. You savor it and play with it.

Authorial Misdemeanors - Agent Richard Curtis There seems to be a law of nature that the quality of a manuscript declines in inverse proportion to the elaborateness of its package. When I receive a manuscript bound by brass screws with a plastic embossed cover, lovingly wrapped in chamois cloth, set in a velvet-lined cedar box, shrink-wrapped, packed in turn in a fireproof strongbox secured with iron bands, I am prepared to stake my career on the likelihood that this book is one colossal dud. From time to time an author will do something that causes me to scratch my head. I've compiled a list of these foibles and offer it here with a light heart. If you have perpetrated any of these transgressions I'll let you off this time without a fine, but don't let me see you in this courtroom again. I must say right off the bat that among the things authors do that irk me, delivering manuscripts late is not one of them. Lateness is the medium in which agents live. We breathe late manuscripts and eat late checks and drink late contracts. And lateness in a creative person is certainly more understandable and forgivable than it is in a business organization. I have never known an author to be deliberately late with a book, but I have known many a publisher to be deliberately late with a check. What kills me, however, is authors who don't tell me they're going to be late. Publishers schedule books many months in advance, and in most cases are able to pull one out of the schedule if given sufficient notice. In most cases, too, a publisher will grant the author a reasonable extension of delivery date. If, however, out of embarrassment or some other reason (such as a moonlighting gig the agent doesn't know about), an author doesn't level with his agent, he will not only get himself into trouble, but his agent as well. An agent who knows the truth can go to bat for his client, make excuses, concoct a fib. But if an agent sincerely assures an editor that a book will be turned in in June because that's what his client told him, when the client knew all the time that there wasn't a chance in hell that he could make the deadline, the agent's credibility will be damaged. I make very few inflexible rules for my clients, but this is one of them: no matter how embarrassing your reasons may be (one author's dog actually did eat his manuscript), I insist that you tell me the truth so that I can make proper excuses for you. (I, of course, have never lied on behalf of a client. What kind of agent would I be if I lied on behalf of a client?) Lying to your agent is a mortal sin, but authors commit many venial ones as well, and oddly enough, it is the latter variety that drives me absolutely up the wall. Take authors who misspell "Foreword," for instance. I strongly feel that anybody who turns in a manuscript containing a "Forward" deserves automatic shredding of his manuscript plus the first three fingers of his right hand. You would think I would not have to explain to professionals who make their livings with words that a foreword is a fore-word, a word that comes before the main text. But as the Forward-to-Foreword ratio on manuscripts submitted to my agency is about one out of three, I can see that the correct spelling cannot be stressed enough. It should be enough to remind you that "Foreword" is usually the very first word one's eyes fall upon when opening a manuscript. (I hesitate, however, to criticize writers for not knowing the difference between a foreword, a preface, and an introduction, since I don't understand it either.) Like many publishing people I am a fanatical believer in the importance of titles: a good or bad one can significantly affect the fate of a book. The Forward-Foreword offense is part of a larger conspiracy to send agents to early graves. I am referring to authors who don't review their manuscripts before submitting them. An occasional, random typo is one thing, but when I realize that the author never bothered to reread his manuscript, have it vetted by a good speller, or run it through the spell-checker on his computer, a murderous rage comes over me and I am compelled to steal into the night to overturn garbage cans and scratch automobile fenders with my ring. Don't authors understand (I growl at alley cats as I kick them) that today's literary marketplace is so intensely competitive that a poorly spelled manuscript can lose somebody a sale? A subspecies of the above-mentioned type misspells critical words and names, and misspells them consistently, focusing a glaring light on his or her own carelessness. I remember a Biblical novel in which the word "Pharaoh'' was misspelled "Pharoah" throughout, and in a book that long, that's a lot of Pharoahs. I have often wondered why, if the word is pronounced fayro, lexicographers have chosen to place the a before the o. In fact, what is an a doing in the second syllable at all? Such speculations do not mitigate one's intense annoyance at having to correct such errors over and over again in saga-length manuscripts. Speaking of repetitious errors, I'm reminded of those authors who print the title of their book as a header on every page of manuscript. I don't know where this quaint custom arose. I suppose it has its origins in the paranoiac fantasy that part of a manuscript will inadvertently be separated from the rest in a publisher's office. Against this remote possibility must be weighed the not-so-remote one that the title you print on every page of your manuscript will be a lousy one. Like many publishing people I am a fanatical believer in the importance of titles: a good or bad one can significantly affect the fate of a book. All too often I'll get a good book with a bad title, and after kicking alternate titles around the author and I will agree on a new one. I'll then prepare a new title page only to discover that the discarded title appears on every page of the manuscript. Now what? I must now either go out with a badly titled book or have the entire manuscript reprinted just to knock the offending title off every page. Luckily, the advent of word processing makes it easier to run off modified manuscripts. Authors who submit their only copy of a manuscript are, to say the least, an intense source of curiosity to me. They brazenly challenge the immutable law guaranteeing that that manuscript will get lost in the mails. Still, do us both a favor and leave the title off the header of every page. Nowadays manuscripts are submitted as email attachments. But many agents still prefer to read submissions in printed form. The peeve potential here is very high. On occasion an author will send me a manuscript ring-bound like a scientist's notebook. I ask myself what terrible thing I did to this person that he should avenge himself on me so cruelly. Am I supposed to read his manuscript standing up at a lectern, or remove the pages from the binding rings knowing that I will have to reassemble it when I am finished? I think it's time that writers understood something about literary agents: their standard reading posture is supine, head elevated sufficiently to glance at a baseball game or sitcom on television. Now that I've revealed this tightly guarded secret, perhaps you'll be more considerate and submit your manuscript unbound. And is it too much to ask while I'm at it that it be double spaced in 12-point font and printed on one side of the page only? And when you do post it, may I ask you not to have it bound or specially boxed or wrapped? Just a loose manuscript in a typing paper box wrapped and taped securely enough to get safely through the postal system. There seems to be a law of nature that the quality of a manuscript declines in inverse proportion to the elaborateness of its package. When I receive a manuscript bound by brass screws with a plastic embossed cover, lovingly wrapped in chamois cloth, set in a velvet-lined cedar box, shrink-wrapped, packed in turn in a fireproof strongbox secured with iron bands, I am prepared to stake my career on the likelihood that this book is one colossal dud. And in all likelihood it will be sent via Fedex or courier with the expectation of an overnight response. There is a particularly lukewarm place in my heart for foreign authors who are obliged to use typing paper of different dimensions - approximately ½ inch too long and ¼ inch too narrow - from the standard American 8½ by 11 inches. I realize how chauvinistic it must sound to deplore the paper that was probably good enough for Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Graham Greene, but because agents usually place manuscripts in submission boxes to protect them and present them attractively, it drives us crazy to get a misshapen manuscript from the Continent requiring Procrustean measures to package the submission. Authors who submit their only copy of a manuscript are, to say the least, an intense source of curiosity to me. They brazenly challenge the immutable law guaranteeing that that manuscript will get lost in the mails. The advent of computer document management and cheap photocopy services has stimulated a rise in lost manuscripts, for authors who used to type an original and carbon now type an original only and bring it to a photocopy shop, where another immutable law causes it to get mixed up with somebody's master's thesis. Again, computers make the question of lost manuscripts academic, but computers can crash. So keeping a hard copy is definitely a good idea. Then there are the authors who administer tests to their agents. Some try a cute trick of turning one page in their manuscript upside down. If the agent returns the manuscript with that one page still upside down, it proves he didn't read the manuscript page for page. Plainly, the evil that authors do may be categorized as Class B Misdemeanors, punishable by groans, rolling eyes, sighs of frustration, and indulgent smiles. There are authors who quiz their agents about specific scenes and characters. A typical dialogue might sound like this: AUTHOR: Did you like my book? AGENT: Oh, yes, loved it, loved it. AUTHOR: Great. What did you think of my character Pflonk? AGENT: Pflonk? Terrific character. Nicely developed. AUTHOR: Hah! Gotcha! There was no such character in my book! I assure you that when it comes to an important book your agent reads your manuscript carefully. With so much riding on it, he has to. But most agents I know don't have time to read their clients' work page for page, nor do they need to in order to get a sense of its quality, organization, and pace. In fact, they don't even need to in order to sell it. With certain kinds of material, such as books in a series, a light once-over is enough to satisfy your agent that all is in order and the work follows the original outline. Plainly, the evil that authors do may be categorized as Class B Misdemeanors, punishable by groans, rolling eyes, sighs of frustration, and indulgent smiles. I would like to think that you are as tolerant of your agent's foibles. Agents do have them. (I know this only from talking to authors). There is one extremely successful agent who likes to boast he's never read anything he's sold. And there's another who, every time he makes a big deal for a client, gloats, "That will pay for a new set of radials for my sports car," or, "Now I can put that new wing on my house." I consider myself truly fortunate in not being possessed of any personality traits that irritate others. Well, maybe one or two. All right, maybe a few more than that. Okay, okay, so I'm riddled with them. But at least I know how to spell "Foreword." Copyright © by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved. ________________________________ View the full article

Are "brutal" reviewers really good for you? So what spurred this question? A friend recently said she had a "brutal critique partner" that could be relied on. It got me to thinking about brutal reviewers in my own experience who were worse than useless and actually destructive. We need to keep in mind that the better an ms becomes, the harder such "brutal" critics are forced to dig for critique at all costs, inevitably focusing on matters of taste, e.g, "I don't like that character's personality..." as opposed to "I think this point could be made clearer by doing XYZ." You could put 10 of these brutal negative types in a room and they would shred an unpublished novel to pieces in their own special way. But if the exact same novel were actually written by a commercial author favorite of theirs, they would not only praise it but compete with each other to deliver the most positive, in-depth insight into the work. Their blurbs would shower Amazon with five stars. Perhaps a "however" now and then, but nothing that would ever approach the brutality of decimating the ms they believed unpublished. Frankly, I've had experience with various coverage types in LA and fought huge battles with them over specific screenplays and manuscripts by writers known to me (two were clients) who they were attempting to annihilate, and I noticed, the more perfect the manuscript, the more vehement and extreme the critique. It was as if the good story and great prose infuriated them and made them all the more determined to find ways to chop at it. Of course, they made their living by using negativity as a substitute for authentic and insightful review, much like certain commercial book reviewers who go viciously negative in order to stand out in a crowd. When looking for feedback on a fantasy manuscript I wrote two years ago, I purposely sought out three writers who I knew would rip me a big one (for various reasons), and all three did, but there were no commonalities. I figured that reasonably intelligent writers straining hard to be negative would find an issue if it really existed. It was weird to watch them strive to be as negative as possible over essentially petty things. I once sent a very polished ms to some editors in Iowa who I trusted to put the final coat of paint on the top floor. Instead, they shredded the opening chapter of the ms in every inconceivable way. They strained to dissect sentences and nitpick "the real meaning" vs. the words actually used, and in a manner nothing short of bizarre. They even hated italics! Determined to be negative at all costs, the Iowa people didn't say one positive thing about any facet of the ms. When not provided their normal diet of necessary edits they simply picked and picked until they created a series of false negatives. The coverage people in LA, as I noted above, imitated this Iowa group. However, I couldn't help but notice the exact same editors, when courting a client for monetary reasons, fell over themselves being complimentary. Hmmmmmm... In conclusion, if you must use reviewers, search for balanced personalities and look for commonalities. ________________________________ View the full article