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My latest novel, An Honest Man, is set in Maine and was written in Maine. This might make one think it qualifies as Maine fiction – and I respect your confusion. I’ve lived part-time in Maine for eight years now, and there are two disqualifiers in there. You can’t be a Mainer if you live in the state for “part” of a year (waivers may be considered for natives) and if the word following the number eight is years rather than generations, don’t even think about it. It was in Maine that I became aware of the acronym P.F.A., which stands for “People From Away.” This is one of the great terms for outsiders I’ve ever heard. There is Maine, and there is Away. The End. My wife, born and raised in Maine, the fourth generation on both paternal and maternal sides in her small mill town, is a generally subdued woman, and yet I swear you can hear her brain sizzle if someone refers to her as seasonal. No, it doesn’t matter that it’s true now. She’s from Maine. Not From Away. If the phrase “shovel the roof” was ever uttered in your childhood home, and if the summer meant work, not vacation, you carry a different Mainer card. There’s a Mafia sensibility to it, in my opinion – I think of Al Pacino as Lefty, explaining things to Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco: “When I introduce you, I’m gonna say, ‘This is a friend of mine.’ That means you’re a connected guy. Now if I said instead, ‘this is a friend of ours,’ that would mean you’re a made guy.” Replace “made” with “Maine” and I think you’ve about got it. I’m a connected guy. Closest I’ll ever get. We have a remarkable list of native writers – topped by Stephen King and Elizabeth Strout, geniuses both – and so many others it’s embarrassing to begin the list for fear of the talent you’ll leave out. Morgan Talty and Carolyn Chute and Paul Doiron. The great absence from many lists is Tabitha King, who’s awfully damn good, and knows the world of which she writes. Colin Woodard and Monica Wood. (You know the talent well is deep when you can get to the “wood” part of the alphabet and still have multiple options.) But I write on behalf of the W.F.A.’s – Writers From Away – who are drawn to this particular corner of the world. E.B. White is the Godfather of Maine’s W.F.A.’s. Richard Russo has now taken his torch. John Irving may not live here, but he knows the state well, and his depiction of a Maine high school wrestling match in The Imaginary Girlfriend may be among my favorite regional portrayals, if not the most flattering. We have John Connolly and Chris Holm, Lily King and Liz Hand. Sarah Langan conjured a nice chilly mill town in The Keeper. The late, great, Anita Shreve wrote multiple novels set in Maine, including her last, The Stars Are Fire. Tess Gerritsen is a transplant of pride. (Were I given a vote for true Mainer status, she’d get one based on her daily walking regimen alone.) It’s a hell of a state to write about, whether you were born here or not, and there’s a reason so many writers are drawn to it. Beauty and brutality share the same waters and ridges; the place is always active, and the idyllic moment may be swiftly replaced with a punishing one. The past weighs heavily on the present, chilled breaths on the neck as you drive by tilting tombstones in forgotten graveyards. In the land of spotty cell signal, you might find yourself – gasp! – alone with your thoughts. Not bad for a writer. My local library in Camden had a sign up for a time claiming there were more writers per capita in Maine than any other state, and I believe it. When the sun goes down at 3:45 in December, a good book is your best friend other than the woodstove. Why not read one? Hell, why not write one?! Join us. Be a friend of mine, as Lefty would say. *** View the full article

A missing person is a story that doesn’t end. We grapple to make sense, to decipher, to make meaning out of something so unfathomable. Jon Billman refers to the ‘purgatorial underworld of the vanished,’ a description that makes infinite sense to me. The missing are perpetually caught in an in-between place, not here but not gone. Stories about missing persons respond to this cultural anxiety, their narratives plotting explanations or recovering and remembering the missing person, refusing their oblivion. In my novel Tell Me What I Am a woman goes missing leaving behind her four-year-old daughter and sister. They alternately narrate the story of what happened and, I like to think, together engage in act of recovery. Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell Jewell’s psychological thriller moves between timelines and narrators to create a complex and disturbing story about a missing girl. Ellie Mack disappears just weeks before her GSCEs. Her mother Laurel can’t get past her ‘raw need to keep the search going’ and, a decade later, finds herself completely alone, her husband and other children living their own lives elsewhere. Then, Laurel meets a man whose nine year old daughter who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ellie. The tension is intensified by Jewell’s use of multiple narrators, two of whom narrate in the first person and know something about Ellie’s disappearance. Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan In the summer of 2005, 18-year-old Kim Larsen vanishes on her way to work. Her Chevette is found several days later in a nearby town. O’Nan resists generic expectations, side-lining the true-crime thriller elements to offer a compassionate portrait of a family afraid to give up in the face of tragedy. Narrated alternately by Kim’s mother, father and fifteen-year-old sister, O’Nan shows us a different kind of procedural: endless waiting, spending nights with the ‘missing’ on websites as her sister does, or taking pills to fall into unconsciousness like her mother. Perhaps the most devastating character is the father, desperately driving up and down highways distributing flyers, trying to keep his daughter in the public consciousness. Nox by Anne Carson Carson’s brother Michael disappeared in 1978 to escape imprisonment and for two decades wandered, making minimum contact with his family before his death in 2000. Nox is an elegy, an experimental poem, narrating his story through ephemera – scribbled notes, photographs, sketches, fragments of phone conversations all stapled in, glued on, copied. This handmade, tactile book felled me, showing how words can resist oblivion and forgetting. ‘A brother never ends,’ she writes. I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in 1937 during her attempt to circumnavigate the world is deeply fixed in the public imaginary. In this fictive autobiography, Mendelsohn imagines the fate of America’s most famous missing person. Stranded on an island with her navigator, the putative Earhart reflects on her life, her marriage to Putnam and the pressures surrounding the final flights. The prose is sensuous and lyrical: They flew ‘like fugitive angels,’ she writes, and ‘spent our days feverish from the flaming sun or lost in the artillery of monsoon rains and almost always astonished by the unearthly architecture of the sky.’ Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid The ‘Highway of Tears’, Canada’s Highway 16 in British Columbia, is a 725km stretch of road known for the number of missing and murdered indigenous women. Journalist Jessica McDiarmid who grew up near the Highway spent several years interviewing families of victims and researching the cases, the investigations and media coverage – particularly highlight the disparate responses when victims were white rather than indigenous. Focusing on the lives of the girls and women before they disappeared and the experiences of their families in the aftermath of their disappearances or deaths, McDiarmid highlights a larger problem of systemic racism, indifference and victim blaming. The Last Stone by Mark Bowden In 1975 Mark Bowden author of Black Hawk Down was a cub reporter for a paper in Baltimore Maryland when two sisters Katherine (10) and Shelia (12) Lyons disappeared from a shopping mall outside Washington DC. He reported on it for two weeks but there were no answers and for almost forty years the case was cold. In 2013 an investigator came across a statement given by a Lloyd Welch (18 years old). Welch had gone to police to say he’d seen the girls being forced into a car by a middle-aged man in a suit but failed a polygraph. The investigator noted that a mug shot picture of Welch from 1977 resembled the police sketch of a suspect at the mall. The Last Stone focuses on the extended interrogation sessions with detectives in which Welch fabricates and lies but ultimately confesses. Gripping and a tribute to the tenacity of the detectives who literally turned every last stone. The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America’s Wildlands by Jon Billman Early one spring morning Jacob Gray stepped off his bike in the northern district of Olympic National Park in Washington state. It is not clear why. Four arrows are found stuck in the ground between his bike and the road. The details become ciphers, like secret communications from the missing. The Cold Vanish focuses not so much on those who have disappeared in the North American wilderness but those who go looking for them. On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons by Laura Cumming This memoir about the mystery of Cumming’s mother’s identity and her abduction when she was three years old is beautifully descriptive yet reads almost like a thriller as the past unspools. With her mother, Cumming sifts through objects, photographs, police reports, and shadows of memories as they piece together the story of the missing persons in her mother’s life and her missing past. She quotes St Augustine: ‘The dead may be invisible, but they are not absent.’ A stunning reflection on how we forget, remember and love, even those who were missing all our lives. * View the full article

In crystalline prose, The Lookback Window opens on a sun-dappled resort, but dread seeps through. When the Child Victims Act goes into effect in New York State, a yearlong lookback window opens, allowing now adult victims to sue their abusers. Reading about these cases, Dylan’s life is thrust open. As a teenager, he was the victim of sex trafficking. Now in his twenties, confronted with the opportunity to seek justice, Dylan revisits the past and descends into the deep well of his emotions. Written with rage, sex, pain, and understated dark humor, Kyle Dillon Hertz’s The Lookback Window is a powerful examination of our culture’s response to sexual violence against men. Through its close attention to the lives of men healing from abuse, the novel searches for what justice can look like in our world today. Kyle Dillon Hertz is a writer based in New York. He spoke with CrimeReads about the novel, the power of language, and his thoughts on heroes and villains. Michael Colbert: In his relationship with his husband, Moans, Dylan often feels himself slipping away. He tells his therapist, “I’m afraid that if I don’t lose him I might never get to be myself.” How were you thinking about codependence in their relationship? Kyle Dillon Hertz: Dylan was young when he met Moans. A lot of my friends leaving their very late teens and early 20s, especially my queer friends, ended up in these relationships with much older people—and not bad relationships, nothing TikTok would make a fuss over—but in these relationships, they did placate or play to someone a bit older, who helps them get through. I think part of the quote is that when you’re young, good looking, and you find these people who want to be with you, you play to them. The other part is the lookback window. All the different characters in The Lookback Window have a different philosophy of healing from trauma. You have Dylan, who eventually gets quite angry and confrontational. And then you have Moans, who also grew up in a quite traumatic environment, and due to the religious way he was raised, due to the ways that his family learned to survive, he represses or suppresses the reactionary, revolutionary, confrontational feeling that Dylan learns to heal with. I’m not necessarily saying one way or the other is better, but in this specific regard, you see how two ways to potentially deal, live with, and heal from trauma play with each other. MC: Did your characters develop from an interest in examining those differences, or did those differences develop organically? KH: I think in many ways organically. For a novel to work for me, you need oppositional figures. I think a lot of writers occasionally look at things in terms of hero and villain, which I just do not find compelling at all. I actually fucking hate our world that is so into this: the Marvel issue, the Harry Potter issue. This kind of thinking and plot is so absolutely boring to me, and I just find it useless. To me, a better way to think of it is oppositional forces. The more oppositional forces that are within the narrative, the greater the opportunity for character, for plot, for growth there is. I find that is in many ways true to real life as well. You have an issue, and you talk to your friends, they have a different opinion than you. That’s how the world works to me; it’s a series of oppositional forces. In your background, is that The Leftovers from HBO? MC: Yeah. KH: To me, that’s one of the greatest shows that exists. I wrote most of this book to the Max Richter score. That show also does that thing where there’s no real villains. You have these eight people who are dealing with grief in different ways, and [the show looks at] how it interacts with each other. I find that narrative work fascinating, compelling, and in many ways true as to real life. MC: That feels true to Moans and Dylan; they reach an impasse because of how their responses interact. Instead of hero and antihero, how did you think of Dylan as you wrote? KH: I thought of him as a victim with what I believe to be righteous anger. Instead of trying to fit these tropes into a book that does not play by the rules of them, I wanted to follow someone on their path to healing from this very specific thing, which in Dylan’s case involves being quite angry, quite confrontational. To me, that’s extraordinary. There’s a part later in the book where Dylan talks about wishing he could grant other people their anger without judgment. I know many people in my own life who if they just allowed themselves to be angry for actually grievous harm would probably have a bit of a better life. In some ways, I find Dylan to be a little heroic in that regard; he is attempting to live in a way that would benefit a lot of people: to permit each emotion its due and not just suck things up to make the world better. The world is a really shitty place, and what happens to these characters is often really shitty. What little wrongs Dylan does, Moans does, Alexander does, James does, these are little wrongs in a world of gargantuan wrongs. That’s not in the realm of hero and villain. They’re all people who have been harmed and are attempting to account for that harm. MC: There’s a really interesting passage on the power of language and the use of the words victim and survivor: “Language has reached its peak. We now live in an age where people claim words designed by people who want them to suffer…This is not the age of degradation, but the age of language surpassing sound and becoming a product.” What power can language have for people, and how does that get blunted by misuse? KH: Languages are a living thing to me, in many regards. I freely use the word faggot. This is a word that my friends and I use. This is not a profane, horrible, nasty word when we use it in this regard; of course, it can be used in that regard by other people. It’s complex, right? On one level, in that moment, I was permitting Dylan to play around with language, attempting to come to some idea on what it means to be a victim. I do think in many regards the use of the word survivor is so fucking annoying. It’s like when you go to a bookstore, and you see a used sticker slapped onto a book. It’s this labeling that sort of permits this thing to still be read but also qualifies the fact that it’s been handled before, and maybe handled roughly, so you can pay a little less for it. I find that word “survivor” to be in that territory for me. I just don’t use it. I find it annoying. I find it frustrating, and I sometimes think that the identity around survivor does more harm than good. Here’s an example of that. In New York State, you’re a crime victim. You can go to the Crime Victims Treatment Center. The use of the word victim in this regard is pointed towards services. It blows my mind that people don’t know if you get attacked, raped, or molested in New York, there’s a place you can go to as a victim for free therapy. Then through the Office of Victim Services, you can get any financial burden like your therapy reimbursed. All of that is wrapped up in the word victim, where there are real things that it’s going to do. To me, the “survivor” word is pointed toward Instagram hashtags. It’s pointed toward TikToks. It’s pointed toward this thing that denotes an identity among people rather than a whole world where you can actually maybe heal. The word survivor pisses me off a little bit, and Dylan takes it much further than that, but I think there’s truth in what he’s saying. MC: This book looks directly at violence against men. Are there any conversations you hope this book opens up? KH: I hope first off that people read the book and get some kind of enjoyment out of it, whether that’s the language, whether it’s the genre, whether it’s the explicitness, the sex, or the ideas. This book really does discuss sexual violence in men, which is barely any different from sexual violence among women. For example, the FBI didn’t even include that rape could happen between men, I think, until 2013, so when we’re talking about statistical differences, it literally wasn’t even legally a definition until 10 years ago, it wasn’t even a question being asked. I hope in many ways what the book grants people is language to talk about these things. Sometimes I do think it’s easier to hear from a character who speaks way louder than you ever will, who says maybe a bit more intense things than you will in order to give you a framework to push back against, to maybe steal some things from, and most of all, to feel something from. These things have deep, real world consequences. These are deeply felt things that I think and care really deeply about. I hope that anybody who reads this book, especially men, especially queer men, really get a chance to feel like, “Okay, fuck, I have had these experiences. I’ve had these similar things happen.” I’ve had so many people through writing, editing, talking, and having read this book, be like, “This thing happened to me. And I felt like a) I couldn’t tell anyone, b) the people I told I didn’t care.” I think a lot of people in the world don’t even have a framework to understand male sexual violence. I think people do want to care. I don’t think people are that fucking nasty and cruel, but I don’t think people have a framework to understand that. I hope this book frees someone up to talk about that. MC: You said Dylan’s speaking a bit louder than someone else might. What was it like writing his anger? KH: I think the book really does not start in quite an emotional place. Dylan’s journey is really a journey toward a) understanding what emotion he’s having, b) feeling it and then c) after many years of repression, due to childhood sexual abuse, actually experiencing it. Once he experiences it and really understands what happened to him, he has a very deep well to draw from, which from a writing perspective was great. It’s an amazing thing to have that kind of wealth to draw from. The anger of this book has been spoken about in a lot of different interviews, and one of the things people say is, “I actually haven’t read that many contemporary angry books,” which is a funny thing to hear, because I guess I really haven’t either, although they do exist. I’m really angry at the world. A lot of my friends are really angry at the world. It is really difficult to look at this shit and be like, “I’m cool. This is all great.” For me, it felt honest to write an angry book because I’m angry. It felt good to write something honest and not bullshit like four friends in Brooklyn talking over tea, because that’s not a world I recognize. MC: Your book opens with a Lana Del Rey epigraph. You received a review that compared the novel to Norman Fucking Rockwell. Why does her work resonate with you and this book? KH: The book is a very American book in many ways. It deals with the American justice system. It has a very American way of speaking. It’s completely and totally profane. Lana does that as well: American iconography, American language. She’s talking about her Pepsi Cola pussy. She’s talking about fucking daddies—it’s that kind of American way of writing that taps into classics and nature but also is completely prone to fits of explicitness. I specifically set out to allow myself that. The other thing Lana does really well—she draws from different genres. This book in some ways has been hard to classify because it draws from mystery, it draws from crime, it’s literary fiction, it’s a romance, it’s pornography. It draws from all of these different genres, and she does that really well. MC: This book moves from New York to Fire Island, and in its depiction of these settings, I was curious if you had any gay literary influences. KH: I’m a huge fan of Andrew Holleran. I think Dancer from the Dance is one of the greatest books ever written. My book is very different from his; the voice is very different, but he can be explicit. He sets it in a queer world, and my world is a queer world. Everyone I know is queer. I wanted to write for them and not for the people who would be shocked, which is something that Andrew Holleran does, as well. There are some other contemporary people like Kyle Carrero Lopez, who writes these great, queer poems. There’s this one other book I love called An Arrow’s Flight by Mark Merlis. He wrote a retelling of the AIDS crisis set in ancient Greece, but it’s bizarre because it’s a contemporary Ancient Greece. It’s a fucking insane book, one of the best books I’ve ever read. There’s this one part in the middle of my book that’s a retelling of the fall of Apollo on Fire Island while the characters are high on shrooms and attending orgies. That one little bit in some ways is my love letter to Mark Merlis. MC: What’s interesting to you right now in fiction, whether in your reading or your own writing? KH: The new book I’m working on is a a queer World War Two novel on Paragraph 175. Tons of gays in the Holocaust were killed in prison. Paragraph 175 was this law that if you were gay, you went to jail. Upon the liberation of the camps, the gay prisoners were put into German prisons. Part of the reason why there’s barely any accounts of what happened to queer people in the Holocaust is because a ton of them were killed, and then beyond that, they were put in prison. I think with what’s going on in our country right now, Paragraph 175, the criminalization of queer people, has been so much on my mind. On a more positive note, I’m kind of obsessed with people who do different types of books, like people who jump from one subject to another. Percival Everett is one of them, who I’m obsessed with right now. And Colson Whitehead is, of course, extraordinary. The ability to shift genre is something that I find really fascinating. –This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. View the full article

I must admit a fondness for following influencers. They’re just like us, but curated! Personally, I follow the plus size and modesty influencers (along with all the booktokers and bookstagrammers), while most of these novels are focused on jet-setting beauties and polished mums, but anyone who’s even dipped their toe in social media understands—branding and personhood become dangerously intertwined when the product you’re selling is your own life. Beyond all the messiness that happens IRL, there’s extra potential for danger in being Extremely Online. But is that danger more about exposing yourself to stalkers? Destroying your own privacy and that of your family? Or is it a more insidious creep from self-reliant normality to narcissistic emptiness, a slow seeping away of selfhood, that so disturbs us about those who bare all for their fans? The following novels don’t shy away from asking the hard questions when it comes to exploitation, but provide complexity and context for those who’ve chosen to live their lives in front of the camera. Megan Goldin, Dark Corners (St Martin’s Press) A serial killer soon to be released from prison receives a visit from an influencer. Shortly after, she disappears. Could he be involved? What could she have found out about his past crimes? Goldin’s true crime podcaster heroine Rachel Krall returns to find answers. Disha Bose, Dirty Laundry (Ballantine) Ciara Dunphy is the queen bee of her small Irish village, whose ambivalence towards her own family doesn’t make it into her carefully curated mommy influencer persona. Her best friend, Mishti, misses her home in India and distrusts her psychologist husband and his reluctance to visit their relatives. Her sworn enemy, Lauren, has been picked on for far too long by the mean girls of the village, and she’s had about enough of Ciara’s fakery. And then, Ciara ends up dead….I tore through this delicious and insightful thriller, where plenty of plausible suspects and reveals keep the reader guessing. Ellery Lloyd, People Like Her (Harper Paperbacks) There’s something really astonishing (and kind of charming?) about the fact that a couple with a child wrote a novel this disturbing. In People Like Her, an Instamom with an enormous following is in danger from one particular fan. What has she done to deserve such fury? And what lengths with her parasocial nemesis go to for vengeance? Of particular note is the narrator’s version of the “Cool Girl” Speech as applied to mothers: they must be neat, but not too neat, happy, but harried, kind, but not to point of spoiling, consistent, but never to the point of inflicting punishment, and constantly providing updates, while letting children live their own lives. Melissa de la Cruz, Going Dark (Union Square) This fast-paced thriller has plenty of shocking reveals and shady characters, as we follow the story of a missing influencer who seems to embody the Missing White Woman scenario (at least, until we begin to uncover her many secrets). There’s also another girl, the one who went missing years before, and who shared more in common with the influencer than one might think. Amy Goldsmith, Those We Drown (Delacorte) Another Sea-mester book! But quite complementary to the other book set at sea, as this one is horror. Those We Drown features a group of wealthy kids and one scholarship student on a weeks-long cruise where they must mingle with influencers, the elderly, and soon enough, sea monsters. Those We Drown gets bonus points for cheekiness—some of the villains are literally named the Sirens, and one of those keeps singing sea shanties. Delightfully campy and creepy! Bradeigh Godfrey, The Followers (Blackstone, August 29) Bradeigh Godfrey has crafted an impeccable cat-and-mouse thriller as the sister of a murder victim stalks the main suspect from the case via his influencer wife. Ten years earlier, he vanished with her niece, and she’s determined to reconnect—and finally solve the crime. Lisa Springer, There’s No Way I’d Die First (Delacorte Press, September 5) 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. Olivia Worley, People to Follow (Wednesday Books, October 31) And Then There Were None meets Device Free Weekend as a group of young influencers gathers on an island for an exclusive tech detox. They’re expecting to be filmed as part of a reality show as soon as their cell phones go dark. Instead, they’re being exposed as frauds to their followers, then dropping dead, one by one. Linda Cheng, Gorgeous Gruesome Faces (Roaring Brook Press, November 7) 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. Charlotte Vassell, The Other Half (Anchor Books, November 21) 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. Delphine de Vigan, Kids Run the Show (Europa, November 28) 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. View the full article

Behind the scenes, high drama and intrigue often far surpass any performance audiences get to see. Colliding ambitions, rivalries, burning resentment, not to mention illicit love affairs, provide wonderful fodder for mysteries. In Missed Cue, I drew on my background as an ex-dancer to set my tale in a dance company. When detective Caitlin O’Connor investigates the suspicious onstage death of an apparently healthy ballerina, she discovers an impatient rival, jilted lover, betrayed husband, secret pregnancy, and a bitter ex-wife. At one point, her partner says, “I feel like we’ve landed in the middle of a soap opera.” No kidding. If you’re a mystery fan who loves the performing arts, here are five memorable mysteries to check out: The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb Slocumb masterfully draws on his own background as a violinist to pen this page-turner about Ray McMillan, a determined young violinist who not only overcomes an unsupportive family but relentless racism and prejudice endemic to the classical music world. When Ray discovers that the family fiddle given to his great-great grandfather by his slave-holding master is actually a priceless Stradivarius, he and his violin take the concert world by storm. But shortly before the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition, Ray’s violin is stolen. Heartbroken, Ray is determined to recover his treasured instrument and launches his own investigation. Suspects abound, but the truth about what happened to Ray’s violin is something he never expected. I could not put this book down, not only because of its twists and turns as a mystery, but for its insider’s view of the devastating impact of racism. Moreover, Slocumb’s lyrical, poetic descriptions of Ray’s experiences playing music are unforgettable. A genuinely remarkable debut! Aria for Murder, a Julia Kogan Opera Mystery, by Erica Miner Erica Miner spent 21 years as a violinist for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and her knowledge of the opera world shines through this delightful mystery starring brilliant young violinist Julia Kogan. Thrilled to be making her debut as a new orchestra member of the world-renowned Metropolitan Opera, Julia is devastated by the shocking assassination of Abel Trudeau, her mentor and the renowned conductor of the orchestra. When Julia’s closest friend in the orchestra is named the chief suspect, she’s intent on clearing his name and uncovering the identity of the real killer. With the help of an opera-loving NYPD detective, Julia uncovers long-held secrets and lethal rivalries in the opera company. Meantime she finds her own life in danger as she becomes the killer’s next target. Miner skillfully interweaves the backstories of Julia and her mentor, which hold the key to the killer’s motivations. And her scene-setting in the opera world, replete with divas, wannabe stars, and snarky stagehands, makes for a delicious read. Murder in Second Position, an On Pointe Mystery by Lori Robbins I highly recommend all three of Lori Robbins’ On Pointe Mysteries, but a particular favorite of mine is Murder in Second Position. For the second time in less than a year, ballerina Leah Siderova finds herself in the thick of a homicide investigation after discovering the body of the ballet company’s autocratic new director. The victim’s nasty assistant immediately accuses Leah, one of the last people to see the director alive, of the crime. Despite the pleas of Detective Jonah Sobel to leave the investigating to him, Leah feels compelled to uncover the identity of the real killer. Fortunately, she has a tribe of helpers, including her mystery-writing mother, ex-dancer best friend, the company’s Russian ballet mistress, a wily cleaning lady, and the hilarious ballet-loving Weird Sisters. Robbins’ background as a professional dancer provides us with rich insights into the rivalries and politics of the ballet world. With fully realized characters and generous dollops of humor, romance, and intrigue, Murder in Second Position is a terrific read. A Fatal Finale by Kathleen Marple Kalb A Fatal Finale is the first in a mystery series starring Gilded Age opera singer Ella Shane who has built her career around assuming “trouser roles”—male characters played by women. Her turn-of-the-century company is hugely successful, and Ella is single-mindedly devoted to her art. But when an overacting young Juliet takes real poison during the final act of Bellini’s I Capuletti e I Montecchi, Ella is understandably upset and distracted. The authorities rule the death a tragic accident, but the more Ella learns about the fledging singer, the more she begins to suspect her death was no accident. And when a charming English duke arrives on her Greenwich Village doorstep to find out what happened to his late niece, Ella is more determined than ever to uncover the truth about the young singer’s untimely demise. Meantime, the mutual attraction between the duke and Ella surprises and confuses her. She’s eschewed marriage and motherhood in favor of dedicating herself wholly to her career. But the duke seems quite enlightened and doesn’t seem to care about their class differences or the prospect of having a working wife. The twists and turns in this mystery absorbed me, as well as the portrayal of a female performing artist’s life in 1899 New York City, a time of enormous questioning of women’s roles amidst a myriad of societal changes. Ella is spunky and warm-hearted, and I found myself rooting for her as she solves a puzzling mystery and negotiates her complicated personal and professional life. The Turnout by Megan Abbott If your reading tastes run to the darkly hypnotic, you’ll be entranced by Megan Abbott’s The Turnout. Siblings Dara and Marie Durant grew up dancing in their mother’s dance school, which they inherited after their parents’ tragic car accident. Along with Charlie, Dara’s husband and once their mother’s prize student, the sisters now run the school together and are busily preparing for the school’s annual Nutcracker performances. The trio appears to operate as a smooth team managing their young students with aplomb. But when they hire a charismatic, barrel-chested contractor to repair the damage from a fire in one of the studios, their unity is disrupted. Marie begins a passionate affair with the contractor, and it soon becomes evident that he has his own agenda for the studio building, as well as the stately home the trio has inherited. In this beautifully disturbing portrait of a troubled family, Abbott moves between the past and present to reveal a web of long held secrets and abuse that culminate in murder. Along the way, she vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of a dance school filled with competitive young people eager for a future in ballet at almost any cost. * View the full article

When I was looking for the perfect setting for the Tea by the Sea series, I didn’t have to think very hard. Cape Cod was the natural choice. In any sort of mystery novel series you need a fairly constant turnover of people. Victim, villain, numerous suspects, all popping up and being mysterious. Popular tourist locations provide that turnover, giving the author a completely different set of people, motives, red herrings and all the rest for each book in the series. To take advantage of a tourist location, it helps if the amateur sleuth is in the tourist business in some way. My protagonist’s grandmother owns a B&B on Cape Cod Bay. Good variety of guests there. My character herself operates a traditional afternoon tearoom on the B&B property. Not only does she get people stopping by for tea, but it’s a good place for B&B guests to spend time. Nothing like family arguments around the tea table to provide fodder for murder. This setting gives the characters an opportunity to air their dirty laundry, while being overheard by the amateur sleuth. Tourist locations are a big help to the author for adding description and mood to the books. There’s a reason popular tourist locations, such as Cape Cod, get lots of visitors and that’s often the scenery. As the property in my series is situated on the bay, I have the full use of a wonderful range of description. Calm seas, tempestuous storms, beautiful sunsets, boats of all sizes and types sailing by. People walking on the beach or swimming in the bay. (Or being chased by deranged killers across the cliffs). Characters head out on whale watching tours, load up the car for the beach, or a stroll on the fishing pier in my town of North Augusta. (North Augusta is not a real place, but it’s mentioned as being close to North Truro.) They enjoy ice cream on the pier while watching dolphins play in the waters below, or downing a huge bowl of clam chowder at a local restaurant. Is there anything more romantic than an ice cream on a pier at sunset? I don’t think so. The third advantage, for me personally, of setting my books in Cape Cod is that I get to visit! I call it research. I’m not the only author who believes Cape Cod is a great place for a mystery series. Here are some others readers would enjoy. Elementary, She Read by Vicki Delany (Yup, me again). The first in the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series. In the town of West London, based on Chatham, Gemma Doyle owes a popular-with-tourists store called The Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium which is situated next door to Mrs. Hudson’s Tea Room. Murder on Cape Cod by Maddie Day First in the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. The title of this one says it all! The protagonist owns a tourist-focused bicycle shop in the “quaint, seaside hamlet of Westham, Massachusetts”. Murder is No Picnic by Amy Pershing Third in the Cape Cod Foodie Mysteries. Cape Cod with the emphasis on food. Yummy. In this one, a clam bake and blueberry buckle are on the menu. Sounds good to me! Murder’s No Votive Confidence by Christin Brecher First of the Nantucket Candle Maker Mysteries. Nantucket might not technically be part of Cape Cod, but to tourists it is, so I’m including this book. In this series the protagonist makes and sells candles. Nothing tourists love more than candles! The Cape Cod Mystery by Phoebe Attwood-Taylor And then there’s a true American Classic. First published in 1931, this was the first of 24 Asey Mayo books inspired by the authors own family’s long history on Cape Cod. For most of us, summer is vacation time. And we all love a good beach read. Whether you’re sunning yourself on the beach or just dreaming about it, you can’t beat a book set exactly where you’d like to be. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Keith Rosson, Fever House (Random House) “[A] whirlwind mystery . . . that hurls [Rosson’s] genre-slashing ambition into the stratosphere.” –NPR Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam) “[A] sensitive tale of reconstructed lives and reexamined choices….Alam’s vivid descriptions of Karachi, nuanced characters, and deft ability to delve into big ideas while keeping the story moving make this an emotionally engaging read.” –Booklist Isabelle Autissier (transl. Gretchen Schmid), Suddenly “There’s no question about it: Isabelle Autissier is an excellent writer. . . . When it comes to describing nature, there’s no one like her. . . You’ll devour this novel.” –Express Isabel Cañas, Vampires of El Norte (Berkley) “Cañas delivers a horror novel full of expressive, sumptuous prose and enlightening historical details.” –Booklist Josh Malerman, Spin a Black Yarn (Del Rey) “Malerman is one of the most intelligent writers of horror fiction working today.” –Bookreporter Una Mannion, Tell Me What I Am (Harper) “Mannion creates an emotionally charged yet gently paced thriller that evokes the doubt and anguish that arise after uncertain loss . . . . Through a relentlessly tempestuous coming-of-age journey, Ruby emerges as a strong, capable young adult.’ –Booklist Sandie Jones, The Trade Off (Minotaur) “Jones unapologetically stares down the ugliness of the modern media and its coldblooded exploitation of celebrities to benefit those truly in power, as well as the rampages of fake news.” –Kirkus Reviews Karen Rose, Beneath Dark Waters (Berkley) “High-wire suspense that keeps you riveted.” –Lisa Gardner Joshua Moehling, Where the Dead Sleep (Poisoned Pen Press) “This title has all the elements of a good mystery: a puzzling crime, dark secrets, fast-paced writing, and deadpan humor…Riveting and a real page-turner; fans of C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett novels or Craig Johnson’s ‘Longmire’ series will feel at home.” –Library Journal Elle Grawl, What Still Burns (Thomas & Mercer) “Dark, absorbing, and altogether addictive. Alternating between Lex Blake’s chilling past and her present-day return to the twisted small town she was desperate to flee, What Still Burns is a firestorm of suspense.” –Tessa Wegert View the full article

“I dream I see blood.” When she was 20 years old, Christy Pinnick came home and found her father, Ray Pinnick, dead on the floor of the kitchen of their Muncie, Indiana home. He’d been killed that cold evening in February 1994 while Christy was working the cash register at a drug store. Nearly 30 years later, Christy is still haunted by what she saw that night. She talks about how she still has nightmares about finding her father’s body. She still wants the men who killed her father to pay for their crime. That night, Christy is certain, those men who killed her father came into the drug store where she worked. She’s been told many times over the past 30 years, by people who knew her father and knew the men, that they had killed Ray Pinnick. She’s talked to police countless times. The men have not been charged. Police investigators, crime scene technicians, emergency medical personnel and, in the worst scenarios, family members and friends of the person who was killed, have a unique perspective on what are widely known as cold cases. The family and friends who find their loved ones murdered will never get the image out of their heads. Sometimes it’s difficult for the professionals who work the crimes. Cold cases are a popular form of entertainment right now, featured in podcasts and TV programs and yes, books, like the one Douglas Walker and I wrote, “Cold Case Muncie” our fourth true crime book published by the History Press. Stories about cold cases capitalize on the public’s fascination with crimes when a person has been killed and their killer isn’t brought to justice. For survivors, being part of a cold case is a nightmare. Anger, frustration over unsolved murders In January 1997, I was pulling Saturday duty for the newspaper where I worked, filling in for the full-time police beat reporter. (Most of the past 30-some years that’s been my frequent collaborator Walker, whose knowledge of crime in Muncie, Indiana over the decades is encyclopedic.) I had heard that a body had been found in McCulloch Park, on the city’s northeast side. When I got there, I saw the victim, a young Black man whose body was on the ground near a railroad trestle. Snow had gathered in his hair and in the folds of his clothing. I waited at a distance while police spoke to a woman who had heard about the crime scene and was worried that her son had been killed. She described him and his clothing and identified him as William Gene Burton. He was only 16 years old. She was angry and broken-hearted as she spoke to police, and her emotions were so strong that I almost had to look away. Her fury and hurt were almost more upsetting than seeing her young son’s broken body where it had been cast aside by his killer. Twenty-five years later, in 2022, I interviewed Burton’s mother for a chapter about her son in our Cold Case book. The death of her son seemed nearly as fresh to her as if no time at all had passed since 1997. She cried and expressed anger and frustration that the killer had never been brought to justice. If not for some emotional detachment, it would not possible for police investigators and coroners and even newspaper reporters to do their jobs. But what kind of person could see the crumpled form of young William Gene Burton, or of a loving mother like Maggie Mae Fleming, slumped on the couch in her modest living room, or the body of Charles Frank Graham, his cigar still clutched in the corner of his mouth, and not feel the loss of another person on the face of the Earth? It’s a thing Walker and I and others who have written about cold cases and, much more importantly, those who have worked to solve unsolved murders, know very well. But grief has no expiration date for the survivors of those who have been murdered. Murders in the typical small American city That’s why we made a conscious effort to center the victims and their families for our book. We’d written about almost all the cases in the book over the years, in a series of articles for The Star Press newspaper in Muncie, Indiana. Because of a 1929 sociological study, Muncie, home of Garfield the cartoon cat and the university where David Letterman went to school, has long been considered the typical small American city. It’s also a place with a high number of murders, including cold cases, over the decades. In the series of cold case articles, Walker and I had written about nearly three dozen unsolved murders, some dating back many years. Almost all those cold cases had one thing in common: Surviving family members and friends who missed and mourned the person who was killed, and who still wanted justice. Cold cases are shockingly common in the United States. The national murder clearance rate, the percentage of homicides that are solved, has over the years fallen to only about 50 percent, CBS News reported in 2022. In writing about unsolved murders in our community, we found some that were still well-remembered – we wrote our third book, “The Westside Park Murders,” about the infamous 1985 slayings of two teenagers – and some are barely remembered. Over the years, we found, local police departments had lost or thrown away many murder case files. Others were ostensibly destroyed by flooding from broken pipes in police storage rooms. In many instances, the police investigators who originally worked the cases had long since retired or had died. Some family members had died, leaving no one to mourn or call for justice. Women and people of color make up a sizable percentage of murders and unsolved murders. In our book, Calletano Cisneros not only mourns the 2009 murder of his son, Sebastian, but questions how hard police worked his son’s case. From his home in a small town in Texas, the older Cisneros told us, “I looked up Muncie and it said it had something to do with the KKK and I thought, ‘Muncie’s not going to do anything. He was Mexican American and a drug addict.’” Police have always maintained they would never disregard a cold case investigation because of the race or identity of the victim. Advocating for those killed Several people we interviewed for the book said they feel like police investigators grew tired of their calls to advocate for their murdered loved ones. At the same time, some investigators told us about cases that haunted them, including one that’s not even been classified as a murder but as a disappearance. One veteran cop told us he’s convinced there’s a victim and killer in a case that most people don’t even know about. In the book, we advocate for the creation of a “Cold Case Squad” of retired police investigators who would re-examine unsolved homicides. We met with a couple of retired cops who said they would take another look at old cases and we talked to the county sheriff in an effort to make it happen. Whether it will or not is hard to say. One thing that might work against efforts to re-examine old cases is the number of case files that are missing, and we devote a chapter to that concern. In the book, we include contact information for local police departments that have jurisdiction over the cases we write about. It was an easy decision to include phone numbers and contacts for police detectives: the investigators want to hear from anyone who might be able to help solve the cases. The survivors of those killed also hold out hope. It’s why Calletano Cisneros spoke to us. He might be skeptical of how police handled his son’s killing, but he hopes that someone, somewhere, will have information about his son’s death and contact investigators. “I just want some justice,” he said. It’s the wish of every person who lost a loved one to a killer. ___________________________________ View the full article

\Horror and religion might sound like opposites at first glance. Most horror fans can probably think of at least one grisly film called out by a faith-based group (usually a sect of a certain religion). But as observed by Richie Tozier in Stephen King’s It, there’s a lot of horror within religious texts, too. And there can be religion/faith in horror texts. That was my perspective when writing my recent novel Cruel Angels Past Sundown, a horror + western mash-up that also draws in Biblical horror on a cosmic scale, exploring concepts of “might makes right” and questioning the conceit of what rightness and goodness mean in a judgmental system. It’s nowhere near the first tale to craft a faith-and-fear sandwich. There are classics like Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin, more recent books like Adam Nevill’s The Ritual, and much more. Any list will only scratch the surface, and I want to take care when there are hundreds of faiths versus labeling a book like, for example, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance a horror novel even when events within are profoundly horrifying. But below I’ve set out seven titles I very much recommend: The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty Starting with a classic, this one’s over fifty years old, but I only (finally) read it this summer. The movie has been more familiar to me. Each cinematic glimpse is a fuller interaction within the book, and that’s true for the horror and faith, too. While both book and film show the exhaustive medical attention given to understanding Regan McNeil’s condition, I appreciate that Catholic priest Father Karras, in wrestling with his faith, scrutinizes every psychological and mental angle before turning to exorcism, even butting heads with faith, and then weighing what he can explain versus what he can’t. If you’ve only seen the movie, you’re missing out on an eloquent, intelligent, and heartbreaking novel. Goddess of Filth by V. Castro What better way to follow a cornerstone of possession and exorcism fiction than with a table-flip on the whole premise? Lourdes, Fernanda, and their friends conduct a séance one quiet summer night, only for Fernanda to take on strange behavior such as cutting herself, speaking in Nahuatl, and more. Local priest Father Moreno believes there’s a demon inside Fernanda, but her possession challenges the notions of what is truly demonic in this world. It’s a captivating turn on assumptions, examining cultural differences and questioning who has the right to claim righteousness when one faith has been the bludgeon to erase another while colonizing many lands and peoples. The Tempest Tales by Walter Mosley After his murder by a cop, Tempest Landry’s soul appears before St. Peter, who determines Tempest belongs to hell. But Tempest refuses to go, even against the devil’s behest, challenging the premise of simple morality when societal workings force a more complex understanding. Not everyone starts from the same place, and Tempest’s return to Earth in another body and with spiritual observers desperate to guide or take him only emphasize how people are tossed around by life. The Long Shalom by Zachary Rosenberg Alan Aldenberg is a former member of the Jewish mob-turned-private detective drawn into a horror story of missing people, inhuman forces, and a grim unreality reaching across time. It’s noir-meets-horror brawler of a book. Also, it’s a distinctly Jewish look at cosmic horror as both a cycle of violence and a threat to identity. Religion isn’t simple here. It’s part of an intersection of language, culture, faith, and significance in which the history of a people is the only thing stopping an unearthly malevolence. Infidel by Pornsak Pichetshote, Aaron Campbell Yes, I’m including a graphic novel, deal with it. Infidel is a visceral exploration of outsider-ness and who decides who’s in or out, examining prejudice both through an apartment building’s tenants and a vicious presence that feeds off hateful thoughts and feelings. The weight of hatred is both emotional and physical here, an almost inescapable manifestation. Also, the art is striking, scary, and gorgeous. Little Eve by Catriona Ward The titular Eve lives in a crumbling stone house off the coast of a small town, where she and her small family live by Uncle’s strict and bizarre rule, preparing them for a seaborne apocalypse. He’s the focus of the book’s faith. As vessel for the terrifying “Adder,” he controls the family down to whether they eat, sleep, speak, or exist in each other’s eyes. Like most of Ward’s books, Little Eve will have you asking “What the hell is really going on?” in delight shortly after starting and all the way to the end. “Solve for X” by Stephen Graham Jones Some short stories stick with you because you want them to; others cling with the bite of cold duct tape and don’t give you a choice. That’s “Solve for X,” maybe the most brutal story in the Stephen Graham Jones collection After the People Lights Have Gone Off. At first it appears to be a simple tale of an abducted woman and her strange tormenter. But as the story develops, it opens into a bloody exploration of conditioning and faith, and whether the belief in creation can influence the universe into genuine manifestation beyond the wounded flesh. The formation of power in belief doesn’t have to be a world-spanning organization; it can be two people and the miraculous horror between them. I read this years ago and still can’t get it out of my head. I probably never will. Maybe you won’t, either. *** View the full article

While some people might consider cozy mysteries the red-headed stepchild of the mystery genre, their appeal continues to endure nonetheless. Not everyone delights in blood and gore and that’s where cozies come in. Opinions vary, but the first cozy mysteries are generally considered to be Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple Series. Whether you agree or not, her series certainly embodies many of the charxacteristics of the modern-day cozy. Cozies are the hygge of the mystery genre. They evoke the same warm, fuzzy feelings as the song My Favorite Things from the Sound of Music—whiskers on kittens and bright copper kettles (especially if those kettles are brewing tea.) Do you remember the Calgon commercial? “Calgon, take me away….” Cozies are like Calgon bath salts. They carry the reader away from this world to an idyllic one, a place the reader would love to visit. In A Deadly Dedication, book number four in my Open Book Series written as Margaret Loudon, I created a fictional quintessential English country town, Upper Chumley-on-Stoke. It has quaint cobblestone streets, half-timbered stucco buildings, stores with names like the Icing on the Cake and the Pig in a Poke and darling thatch-roofed cottages. What I left out (and what the reader doesn’t want to know about) are the less-than-ideal aspects like traffic jams, lack of central heating, sketchy electricity, unreliable WiFi and wonky plumbing. Cozies bring order to a world that is currently very chaotic. In cozies, crooked politicians always get their just rewards and there are no mass shootings or serial killers. That’s not to say that social issues aren’t touched upon in cozies—they are—but with a light hand. Allison Brook deals with the issue of homelessness in Buried in the Stacks, the latest in her Haunted Library Series. The book is light-hearted and cozy in tone but in the library, which is the setting for much of the book, homeless people gather, often disturbing the patrons. Some of them are on drugs and some of them have mental problems. Ultimately a local group creates Haven House where they can receive food and shelter. In my Cranberry Cove Series, Jeff, the protagonist’s half-brother, is struggling with the physical and mental challenges stemming from an injury to his arm sustained while on duty in Afghanistan and in A Deadly Dedication, homosexuality and cross-dressing figure into the plot. In the tenth Bookmobile Cat mystery, Crime That Binds, by Laurie Cass, there is a subplot that revolves around the housing crisis—the high cost of housing, dearth of available units and limited economic development. In my historical series, Murder, She Reported, I touched, however lightly, on the polio epidemic, mental illness and the plight of immigrants and female factory workers in the nineteen-thirties. There is an educational aspect to cozies as well. Many contain recipes or directions for needlework or crafts. Some take place in foreign settings, introducing the reader to different cultures as the protagonist explores new territory. It’s a bit of armchair travel without the hassle of lost suitcases, flight delays and cramped hotel rooms. My Open Book series takes place in England and there are others with settings in France, Italy, Botswana and various parts of the United States as well as around the world. In real life, numerous crimes, including murders, go unsolved. There is no guarantee the perpetrator will face punishment for their misdeeds. In a cozy mystery however, justice is never ambiguous. The reader can relax and enjoy the book knowing that in the end, justice will prevail and they will have the satisfaction of seeing the perpetrator apprehended and declared guilty. Cozy mysteries also pose a puzzle—who did it? Was it the butler in the library with a candlestick or someone else? Just as people have enjoyed doing crossword puzzles since the first one was published in December 1913, they enjoy solving the puzzles in cozies, where the solution involves more brain work than forensic work. There are clues to unravel, red herrings to dodge, and the chance to outwit the police and nail the identity of the perpetrator before the end of the book. With everything happening in the world today, is it any wonder that after watching the nightly news or reading the day’s newspaper, a reader might choose to bury themselves in a nice cozy mystery? *** View the full article

The Last Voyage of the Demeter hoists sail underneath an excellent conceit. The film is an adaptation of a single chapter from the 1897 novel Dracula, Chapter VII, which is an account of a ship’s voyage chartered from Varna, Bulgaria to Whitby, England. The novel Dracula is epistolary and this account is the Captain’s Log, which records strange things happening aboard the ship. Crew members start disappearing and the sea grows tempestuous. Sailors begin reporting seeing a strange man in the shadows of the vessel. “God seems to have deserted us,” the Captain writes. By the time the ship reaches its port, everyone is dead. The sailors do not know that they are transporting Count Dracula from his Carpathian empire to his new English home, but to readers of the novel who have spent the novel’s four opening chapters in Castle Dracula while the Count negotiates the sale of an English estate, it’s evident that he has begun his journey from his ravished homeland to a bountiful new world. The doomed voyage of the Demeter is a logical bridge between these two parts of the novel, but it’s often reduced to a single scene, or even expository shots of a ship leaving Eastern Europe and/or arriving on the shores of England. It is a very clever idea to zero in on this oft-underrepresented section for two reasons. One, the story suggested by the Demeter‘s log is one of incredible drama and terror, an opportunity to explore what must have been, to that doomed crew, a terrifying and dramatic mystery. Two, the tale of the Demeter is, when you think about it, a standard horror movie: it’s about a group of people who find themselves in a remote location with a powerful evil entity or serial killer (or both) who picks them off one by one. The film, written by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz and directed by André Øvredal, is well-versed in its source material, which doesn’t usually technically matter to the quality of a movie but which in this case helps greatly, since this film’s focused relationship to the book is its main selling point; Dracula has been remade so many times that studying the basics feels important for a film that by its very nature promises to burrow into the forgotten details. That being said, it also takes up a very difficult task: it’s well-known at this point that Dracula does ultimately arrive in England after ravaging the ship and feeding on its crew. It’s quite a challenge to build the necessary rhymes and rhythms of the horror genre when it’s an incontrovertible fact that the entire venture is doomed anyway. It’s hard to get the audience to care about characters who are mere footnotes in the original novel and who literally must die. For these reasons, I’m grading The Last Voyage of the Demeter on a curve. To make up for all these obstacles, the movie has the good sense to lean into what a horror movie with these restrictions CAN do to move an audience: steep itself in atmosphere and dabble in gore. The film is equal parts rich and nasty, baroque in its rendering both of day-to-day life on a cargo ship in the late 19th century and the carnage that takes place on its final trip. It’s hard to get the audience to care about characters who are mere footnotes in the original novel and who literally must die. The film takes its time before the scary stuff, allowing the audience to learn about the ship itself, architecturally as well as culturally. Then, when the waters get choppy, the fog rolls in, and the vampire gets loose, the film becomes a shadowy Victorian nightmare. Visually, including in the design of its vampire, the film takes much inspiration from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu, one of the few Dracula films that captures in great detail the terrors on the ship where the Count (or “Orlock,” as he is named for copyright purposes) has stowed away. One of the film’s most frightening sequences, in which the Count stalks the last of the crew, feels tonally in sync with The Last Voyage of the Demeter, even though they are separated by a century’s worth of filmmaking innovations. But The Last Voyage of the Demeter‘s Dracula is almost the least satisfying part. He’s not in it so much, and when he is, it’s as a Orlockian, Kurt Barlow-looking goblin. And don’t get me wrong… that’s scary. It’s plenty scary. He’s ugly as hell. But Dracula the guy is the inspiration for 126 years’ worth of entertainment, and he has more of an impact when he’s a suave foreigner than when he’s his skeletal batlike avatar, or at least when he shape-shifts between the two forms. There are two Dracula films this year—this and Renfield—and both under-use the Count. It’s almost as if these films are scared to, and I get why. He’s one of the most interesting and complicated characters ever created—he’s evil and yet sociable, human and animal, a monster and a gentleman, ubiquitous and omnipotent and yet with many restrictions, invulnerable but with many opportunities for vulnerability. He might literally be the devil. He’s also a feudal landlord from Eastern Europe attempting to fit in busy metropolitan London. That’s a lot to factor in, or even to pick and choose from, when designing a Dracula for your movie. The Last Voyage of the Demeter‘s choice to make him more monster than man works well for the jump scares but also depersonalizes, uncomplicates him as a villain. But this film is mostly about the crew dealing with an unknown, threatening presence among them—like in Alien (1979). Not to recklessly compare movies, but I’d say that this doesn’t work as well because the audience of The Last Voyage of the Demeter has so much more information about the monster than the audience of Alien. And also because the audience knows that Dracula himself is way more interesting than any of the regular guys pulling the lines and steering the ship, even though the actors do their damnedest. Liam Cunningham plays the dignified Captain Elliott, who permits a young doctor named Clemens (Corey Hawkins) to join the crew before the ship departs Varna. Because Clemens is Black, the mostly Slavic and Irish crew treats him with a bit of racism, but no more than he’s experienced before, he explains. The first mate, Wojchek (David Dastmalchian) is a bit suspicious of him, but the Captain’s grandson Toby (Woody Norman) and Woody’s dog both take a liking to him. So does a veteran sailor named Olgaren (Stefan Kapicic). But things grow complicated after they discover all the livestock have been slaughtered and find a young Slavic woman named Anna (Aisling Franciosi) inside one of the many crates of dirt that are being stowed aboard in the hull. Amid these strange developments, the crew focuses their suspicions on the wrong newcomers, worrying about the two strangers above deck (Clemens and Anna) instead of realizing that there is a worse one below. The film doesn’t really turn itself into a witchhunt before it becomes a vampire hunt, which feels like a missed opportunity to complicate an otherwise very, very simple film. Still, when Dracula does materialize, the film becomes a bracing game of hide-and-go-seek with the devil. And if that’s all it accomplishes, that isn’t worth nothing. The film might bite off more than it can chew, but it’s still a dark, deluxe vampire slasher. And, like, I’ll drink to that. View the full article

MODULE IV READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS Personality Types and The Counter Trait The Protagonist Transformational Arc Basics of Character Animation Sympathetic Character Factors in The Hook _________________________________________________________________________________ Personality Types and The Importance of Counter Trait When it comes to sketching any or all of your major and minor characters in the novel, you might benefit from considering the basic personality types first. Let's look at a few of these (how many of you have met these people in the workplace?): The Ultra-Feminine (sexual, fussy, a princess) The Perpetual Victim (you gotta feel for her) The Feminist (she can do it better than he can, banner raiser) The Adventurer/Risk Taker (Ayn Rand meets Tarzan) The Stoic (rock faced, nearly unmovable, hiding something?) The Superstitious (the stars are not right, omens abound, ghosts knocking on door) The Classic Bad Boss (we all know this type) The Wise Leader (minus the bad traits of the classic bad boss) The Brown Noser (yes-man to boss, tyrant to underlings) The Temperamental Wiz (artist, creator, technical wiz, writer, etc.) The Martyr (sets themselves up to suffer, and basks in it) The Benevolent Monk (spiritual mentor, quick with bromides, herbalist on prozac) The Comic Relief (oaf, stumbler, comedian, etc.) The Eccentric (wide variety of quirky forms, e.g., Howard Hughes, Angelina Jolie) The Extrovert (show off, lively, outgoing, perhaps flamboyant) The Introvert or Loner (usually has a secret project underway, drinks alone) The Fearful (nervous perhaps, full of trepidation, doom) The Negative or Pessimist (looks for the dark cloud first) The Positive or Optimist (will only say something good, avoids critical evaluation) The Manipulator (they've been scheming all along, surprise!) The Passive-Aggressive (snippy, uncooperative, sabotaging) The Perfectionist (must be a loner or a leader to get along) The Mr. Personality (classic backslapping "Hail Fellow Well Met") The Ms. Personality (same as above sans backslapping, cheerleader in HS) The Problem Solver (give them a puzzle and step back) The Narcissist (oozing their agenda and desire like boiling hot syrup) It's a relatively simple matter to use the categories above (and invent some of your own) to begin to sketch your characters, play with ideas, but first, you must consider the context, and before you do that, you must understand your story. Now, assuming the latter, let's pretend you are sketching a major sidekick character of some sort, and for their role in the story you wish them to be "The Eccentric" type above. Fine. Now you have a stereotype to work with. But wait! Let's throw a curve at the reader if possible, since that is always a great idea. You never want to be too predictable. Consider, HOW can you make your eccentric different? Well the first thing to do is bestow a peculiar eccentricity upon them, one we haven't heard of before. Chelsea of Bridgehaven cannot eat her rice cereal in the morning until she listens to it pop with her old ear trumpet. Whatever. You get the idea. Next, WHAT IF you mixed the ECCENTRIC with another personality type, for example, the EXTROVERT. Now you have an eccentric extrovert. What would that be like? Chelsea of Bridgehaven, with much ado, invites her unlucky relatives staying overnight to listen to the pop-pop of rice cereal with her new gold-rimmed, black ebony ear trumpet. Well, you get the idea. Mixing stereotypes may help you to reform the stereotype into something a bit different. They may help you invent a counter trait. What do we mean by counter trait? A trait or behavior of the character which seems, at the time, a bit out of character. The behavior or quirk surprises the reader. For example, the STOIC, after three gin and tonics, becomes an EXTROVERT show-off, or perhaps the known NEGATIVE personality interrupts a conversation wherein the participants are castrating male-female relationships to behave more like a POSITIVE or optimist, noting the beautiful and positive aspects of a good relationship. This leads in a backdoor way to the pairing of conflicting emotions. What do we mean by this? In other words, let's say your major character possesses an ideal or overriding goal in their life, but something happens to create doubt. For much of her life, Judy Overstein has wanted to be an attorney, and while eating lunch in D.C. one day, happens to hear a table full of seasoned lawyers talking about how much they hate their lives. The classic seed of doubt is planted. She returns to her law school studies, fighting back the sudden doubt that now creeps into her spine. Before, she was confidently optimistic, but now that emotion and viewpoint competes with doubt and the viewpoints of others. What will she do? What is your character's pair of conflicting emotions? Nothing like a good dose of internal conflict to keep us guessing. _________________________________________________________ The Transformational Arc of Protagonist While you're plotting your story you need to keep in mind the transformation of the protagonist, the phased development of their emotions and knowledge and values that takes place as the story evolves. But before you start mapping out your arc, realize that you cannot do so outside the context of your evolving plot line(s) and story elements. In other words, your plot line and protagonist transformational arc interweave as the dramatic tension rises and the complications, reversals, and stakes become defined. Let's look at the flow below to see a UNIT OF TRANSFORMATIONAL CONFLICT (UTC) that takes place repeatedly during the evolution of the plot line: PROTAGONIST STRUGGLES FOR PRIMARY GOAL => OBSTACLE PLACED => PRE-CONFLICT EMOTIONAL STATE => CONFLICT OCCURS => POST-CONFLICT EMOTIONAL STATE (MIGHT LATER RESULT EPIPHANY OR CHANGE IN PERCEPTION OR ATTITUDE ALTERATION) How your protagonist responds to obstacles and conflict reveals their character, and if, with every UTC above, you reveal a little more change in the protagonist, a little more agony or resolve or confusion, then you are hard at work composing your transformational arc down to the last brush stroke. Indeed, you won't have the arc fully detailed until the story is done, but you can map the basics in a general way. Nevertheless, bottom line, it's your protagonist's response to conflict and dilemma and upcoming crisis that creates empathy with your readership. Keep in mind these five A's as your protagonist reacts to the UTCs of the plot line: Awareness: Your character's consciousness that change or reinvention of oneself is necessary to respond to the conflict. Acceptance: Your character's emotional ability to let go of the old and move on to the new. Approach: Your character's creative exploration of strategic decisions; leading to and ending with their ultimate decision to act one way or another. Assemble: Planning and implementation of plan required to carry out their ultimate decision to act one way or another. Action: Acting one way or another in response to conflict. _________________________________________________________ Basics of Animation, and Sherwood Characters or story first? First of all, how can one possibly write an effective beginning unless one knows the tale? The story must be understood in its parts before the writer pens the opening narrative. Of course. And the characters must complement and fulfill. Various opinions exist regarding author control over the impulsiveness of character. Some say characters should be saddled to carry the story forward, the final destination dependent on the characters themselves, i.e., throw the character dice and the story must follow. The effective author, however, fleshes characters with strength of story and nature while assuming the role of chessmaster, major and minor characters moving according to a greater scheme or plan, checking and mating one another as the story progresses, fitting seamlessly into the flow. In the context of the novel, the animation of character occurs in two basic ways. It is either synergistically provoked, or story/conflict provoked--the latter by far making the strongest impression on the reader, for true depth of character is revealed only when the characters, narrator, antagonist or protagonist react to the major and minor complications, i.e., the conflict and/or difficult circumstance introduced by the story itself. In the The Great Gatsby, for example, Gatsby reacted to the manslaughter of Myrtle Wilson by accepting blame to protect Daisy, meeting his death because of it, while his nemesis, Tom Buchanan, reacted with cowardice and falseness. By their actions shall you know them! Synergistically-provoked characterization refers to that complex synergy of manner, voice, appearance, attitude, reaction, anecdote, and whatever other elements the author applies to the character. Sherwood Anderson was a master at quick and lively character animations of this kind, not only choosing unique characters but also involving them in anecdotes, social relationships, and other character reactions which aided greatly in portraying the character. Using these methods, Anderson was effectively able to render a character memorable despite the lack of powerful complication. For example, from Winesburg, Ohio we have Joe, portrayed by Anderson using the following methods: Backstory and description of what makes Joe special: he has lived with his mother, location of the house, father's occupation, a physical description, then an illustration of Joe's physical problem: "... one who walks upon his fellow men, inspiring fear because a fit may come upon him suddenly and blow him away into a strange uncanny physical state in which his eyes roll and his legs and arms jerk." Additionally, Joe would be "seized" with ideas, a need to change things for the better. This engages reader sympathy and concern. Physical aspects: Hands: "running a thin, nervous hand through his hair. Eyes: wide, rolling "with a strange absorbed light ..." Gait: rapid Smile: peculiar, glistening gold teeth; Manner: would excitedly pounce on people with his ideas and plans. Body: small, slight Short anecdote: Men are standing about discussing a local horse race when Joe bursts in on the scene and commences ranting on the subject of the local creek water. He finishes, turns around and goes about his business as if nothing had happened. Short Anecdote: Anderson moves back in time to recall an incident in which Joe had cornered George (the main character) and ranted and thrashed about the newspaper and how he could improve it if given the chance. Social Relationships: These balance out his eccentricity, make him well rounded for the reader's approval. Joe wanted to be a baseball coach, and the town approved. A baseball game is described, the excitable Joe urging his players on. Character revealed based on the reaction of others: Joe also has a love affair and must go to meet his girlfriend's relatives. The author notes their mean nature and the reader fears for Joe. Suspense is inherent at anticipation of the meeting; however, the relatives laugh, mesmerized by Joe's antics. Because Joe is a minor grotesque of sorts, in that he is eccentric and odd, his portrayal easier, more memorable. Like Anderson, if you choose a character that maximizes the methods you use to portray them, you're ahead of the game, however, learning the methods utilized here is what matters. They can be applied again and again, towards fleshing any character, regardless of inherent oddity, or lack thereof. _________________________________________________________ Sympathetic Character Factors in The Hook If you've won a Pulitzer you might consider disregarding the advice in this section, but it's not advisable. Look at the percentage of novels on the shelf right now that concentrate on creating a character the reader will become concerned with without hesitation. Quite a few, yes? A novel hook with an interesting, unique, and sympathetic character will make agents sit up and take notice. This is vital to avoiding a rejection slip. Examples of what we're talking about as follows. The name of the character in question follows the title and author. All of the factors listed appear in the first 10 to 15 pages. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon Christopher John Francis Boone A first-person narrative from an autistic 15-year-old protagonist: "My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,057." He finds a dead dog with a garden fork sticking out of it and describes the scene in a detached, emotionless manner, until: "I had been hugging the dog for four minutes when I heard screaming." So this autistic child has a heroic capacity for caring and sympathy. He tells us he likes dogs because they are faithful and "they do not tell lies because they cannot talk." This gives us a sense that the character is moral--which becomes all the more poignant and sympathetic when he is unjustly accused by police of killing the dog. He decides to write a murder mystery about the incident. When his teacher Siobhan suggests that a murder mystery about a human might be more compelling, the boy protests that some dogs are cleverer and more interesting than some people. Steve, for example, who comes to the school on Thursdays, needs help to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick ... Thus the protagonist is revealed as a keen and objective observer of the world around him, and in hilarious fashion. Summary Talented and unique - Possesses a handicap - Shows compassion towards others - Possesses a moral sense - Undertakes a challenging task that requires brains and bravery ____________________________ The First Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom Eddie Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. The protagonist is old and infirm, yet polite and optimistic. As a kid, he fought to protect his older brother. Scrappy, brave, and protective. He likes kids, and they like him. He gives them candy and makes animal figures for them from pipe cleaners. These children are not the offspring of relatives or friends. They are kids that know him from the amusement park where he works. It is hard not to be sympathetic toward someone who likes kids and is kind to them. He is generous. He gives his last two $20 bills to a dishwasher so the man can buy something for his wife. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a girl from a falling cart. Summary Possesses a handicap - Protects the weak/shows courage - Generosity and compassion towards others - Brave and self-sacrificing ____________________________ The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Lily Owen Anecdote: When Lily was four, she witnessed a fight between her mother and her father and intervened when she saw a gun in her mother's hand. In the scuffle of the fight, the gun went off; Lily was blamed for her mother's death. Anecdote: Lily awakens her father to see the spectacle of swarming bees in her room. When they arrive in her room the bees have vanished and her father, a mean and uncaring man, threatens to severely punish her if she ever again awakens him to anything less than finding the house in flames. Physical descriptions: Lily's hair is black, like her mother's, but is cowlicky and she looks unkempt because she's never had a woman in her life who could guide her in how to take proper care of herself. She's a fourteen-year old white girl, has almost no chin, but does have Sophia Loren eyes, even though this attribute isn't enough to get her noticed by even the loser-guys. She wears ill-fitting clothes she makes for herself in home ec. class at school because her father won't let her buy any new clothes. Personal Attributes: She's clever, imaginative and bright. The swarm of bees fascinates, rather than frightens her. One of her teachers tells her that she's very intelligent and she shouldn't settle for any career short of being a professor or writer. This sets her to reevaluating possibilities in her life because, prior to this, her highest aspiration had been to attend beauty school and become a hairdresser. Summary Brave and self-sacrificing - Victim of an antagonistic personality - Pitiable due to struggle to compensate for abusive antagonist - Possesses special gifts ____________________________ The Life of Pi by Yann Martel Piscine Molitor Patel General Background: He was raised in Pondicherry, India, the small, formerly French-occupied section of India, at a zoo where his father was founder, owner, director, head of a staff of fifty-three, and which Piscine viewed as "paradise on earth." He was educated at the University of Toronto where he double-majored in religious studies and zoology. General Concern: The first two lines in the book, bring instant concern for him: "My suffering left me sad and gloomy," and goes on to say, "Academic study and the steady, mindful practice of religion slowly brought me back to life." Attitude toward Life: He has suffered a great deal in life, and reports and he has learned to adjust to the pain of being alive by accepting both the folly of success and the slight one feels when success slips from reach. He concludes that the reason death always hovers nearby is because of its love for life and we get the sense he loves life. He appreciates the abundance of resources he has access to and we're to assume this is a love cultivated through great deprivation. Personal Attributes: He's a hard-working, determined person who is very bright, very observant, and infinitely patient. He was the only one in his family who learned how to swim, but he was determined to learn because of his great respect for the man who wanted to teach him and who was responsible for his name, which he shares with a famous Paris swimming pool. He excelled in school and while gathering data for his degree in zoology, he concentrated on observing the sloth in its natural habitat because, "... its demeanour—calm, quiet and introspective—did something to soothe my shattered self." Summary Victim of "suffering" - He's a fighter - Introspective/observant/wise - Unique personality ____________________________ Bel Canto by Ann Patchett Roxane Coss Special Attributes: Roxane is a gifted opera diva. She possesses a voice of crystalline clarity so richly textured everyone who hears her sing can instantly appreciate the wonder and beauty of her vocal talent. It matters little the background of the listener. They may have come to her performance with a well-trained ear or they may have no more understanding of music than can be gathered from a life spent slogging through the mud of a harsh jungle environment; they may have been listening to music all their long-lived lives, or they may be young children staying up past their bedtimes; they may be women, men or adolescents—no matter, gratitude for having heard her is universal among those who have had the privilege of hearing her perform. Reactions of Others: Men desire her. All of the men in attendance at the concert long to be included in the kiss given her in the dark by her accompanist. One of the most powerful businessmen in Japan has flown half-way around the world to be in her presence even as he dislikes traveling, dislikes celebrating his birthday and the occasion is his birthday, and dislikes being with large groups of people he doesn't know, which is the current venue. Over the five years that he's been aware of her talent, he has sought out her performances around the world. She obviously has a magnetic pull on people. Her accompanist willingly places himself as a shield between her and the invading guerrillas. Not until he is poked with guns does he relinquish his protective covering of her body. Physical Attributes: On the floor, her hair spread out around her in such a wondrous array, each terrorist makes a point of walking past her just to look at her beautiful hair. Her perfume is delicate yet intoxicating, again noticeable by the guerrilla soldiers even on this night when the air is pungent with the near-presence of death. Personal Attributes: She is generous with her talent and offers to sing in the dark before the assembled audience becomes aware of the horror of the circumstance they're in. As she lies on the floor, she removes the hairpins from her hair and places them on her stomach in case others can use them as weapons, giving us a sense that she is also a bit brave, another sympathetic character trait. Summary Unique talent/accomplished - Magnetic presence - Cherished by Others - Generous - Courageous ____________________________ Third Degree by Patterson and Gross San Francisco Homicide Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer The protagonist is a successful woman in a traditionally male occupation (homicide detective), and she has earned the respect of her male colleagues. She owns a dog and talks to it as if it were a roommate. She uses her body to shield the dog from harm in a dangerous situation. She is brave; she goes into a burning building to save strangers. She risks her life to save a young child. Summary Successful - Gutsy - Loves Dogs - Risks Life to Save Others ___________________________________________________________ ASSIGNMENT: As with your antagonist, sketch your protagonist using all the categories above. Define them carefully, use anecdotes to illustrate their personality (make certain to have read WINESBURG OHIO before you do this). Pay special attention to the backstory. What is it? Where do they come from? What has their life been like before the story began? Also, note their "pairing of conflicting emotions" if appropriate. Not a bad idea, these conflicting emotions. Note at least five things in your first 10 to 15 pages that will make your protagonist (or a major character/narrator) sympathetic, interesting, and unique; and also note the context, i.e., what is happening in the scene(s) to make all this apparent. Show, don't tell. Note the "counter trait" for at least two of your major characters in your novel, and do so involving short anecdotes of 100 words or less. Note one UTC for your protagonist. Sketch it out based on the UTC flow, in 100 words or less. Referencing your story elements noted in Modules I and III, define the general nature of your protagonist character arc from beginning to end. Use the Six Act Two-Goal structure as an outline for separating your arc into segments. Your protagonist should endure at least seven general, though distinct, phases of emotional/intellectual change as the story goes forward. ___________________________________________________________

In what universe are Tarzan, James Bond, pulp hero Doc Savage and legendary detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Spenser and Lord Peter Wimsey related? In the Wold Newton Universe, and if those words leave you utterly befuddled, let me tell you about the wildest set of connections and extrapolations ever created by an acclaimed science fiction author. It’s a universe of colorful characters and their intertwined histories that continues to unfold after the writer’s death. This universe springs not only from the mind of author Philip José Farmer but also from a real-life incident: The crash of a meteorite to Earth near the village of Wold Newton in Yorkshire, England in December 1795. History tells us that a meteorite of the chondrite, or stony and non-metallic, type fell to Earth at about 3 in the afternoon on December 13, 1795. Several people saw it fall and it landed a few yards from a laborer named John Shipley. The impact left a crater about one yard across and the stone from outer space was embedded several inches into the ground. It weighed about 56 pounds. Edward Topham, a former soldier and journalist, owned the land where the meteorite impacted. Topham showed the meteorite publicly for a few years before it was purchased by naturalist James Sowerby and ended up in the hands of the British Museum. It may now be seen at the Natural History Museum in London and is the largest meteorite to ever fall in England. The Wold Newton meteorite was not known to give anyone nearby special mutant powers or mysterious abilities. Enter Philip José Farmer, who didn’t let the dry facts of the incident stand in the way of a fantastic yarn. Vonnegut’s character got a life of his own Even a casual student of science fiction and comic-book history knows all about meteorites. They’re either the source of superheroic powers – or agents of destruction to people with fantastic abilities. (See: Kryptonite.) Farmer chose the former concept and, in an unmatched bit of revisionist literary history, decided to use the Wold Newton meteorite to form an interconnected world for some of imaginative literature’s most fantastic characters. Not Superman, of course, because his off-planet origin is well known. But very nearly everyone else was included, as Farmer and his successors in tending the Wold Newton Universe would have it. Farmer, an Indiana native who died in 2009 at age 91, began publishing science fiction stories and novels in the early 1950s. He’s known for satirical and groundbreaking stories that explored sexuality and race as story and character points. He’s best known for the Riverworld novels, set on a vast planet where everyone ever born is reincarnated at the same time. (It’s been adapted into a couple of TV series.) In “Riverworld,” Farmer showed he enjoyed mixing real (including Mark Twain and Hermann Goring) and fictional characters. Farmer became a sort of fictional character himself with a 1975 novel, “Venus on the Half-Shell,” which he published under the pseudonym Kilgore Trout. That was the name of a character, an author, created by and written about by Farmer’s fellow Hoosier Kurt Vonnegut. I still remember when “Venus” came out. I was a Vonnegut fan and was instantly confused. Was “Venus” secretly written by Vonnegut posing as the beleaguered science fiction author he had created and included in several novels, including “Breakfast of Champions” and “Slaughterhouse-Five?” After I read “Venus” I wondered, is this written by a great author like Vonnegut who’s posing as some kind of hack writer? It was a mind-bender – and it was apparently not amusing to Vonnegut. In 1999, Farmer wrote that Vonnegut had quickly decided to “stop me from writing sequels” to the book. (Trout’s fame lived on. He even gets a shout-out from Salman Rushdie in his novel “The Ground Beneath Her Feet.”) Not one to leave well enough alone, Farmer also wrote stories featuring Cordwainer Bird, a short, ill-tempered genius whose name Farmer borrowed from Cordwainer Bird, the pseudonym that author Harlan Ellison put on screenplays of his own that he disavowed because of the tampering of TV producers or other writers. As Farmer imagined Bird, he was the nephew of pulp hero The Shadow and also a descendant of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” But Farmer didn’t limit himself to filling in the family tree of Kilgore Trout and Cordwainer Bird. Tarzan, Sherlock and Doc – oh my It’s hard to explain to people today what towering pop literary figures Tarzan, the heir of English lords raised by apes in Africa, and Doc Savage, the pulp hero who inspired comic book heroes like Superman (Doc Savage had a Fortress of Solitude, for Pete’s sake), were in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That’s when paperback repackagings of their adventures showed up in drug stores and bookstores and found a ready audience among the children and grandchildren of the original readers of the tales. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan had long been part of 20th century pop culture, from the original books to comics versions and movies. The 1960s paperback editions of the books brought a new generation of fans to the tales (which certainly contain problematic, colonial elements). As for Doc Savage, his adventures in 1930s and 1940s pulp magazines, written by the pseudonymous Lester Dent, were a huge hit when repackaged in the 1960s and 1970s with covers by artist James Bama. Right about the time those paperbacks hit shelves, Farmer was writing fiction about Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and Doc Savage, sometimes thinly disguised under other names. To do this, Farmer immersed himself in the original stories featuring these characters, so it shouldn’t be a surprise when he became their biographer. “Tarzan Alive,” published in 1972, and “Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life,” published in 1973, aren’t fiction. Instead they’re diligently researched catalogues of the lives of those two individuals, written as if they truly lived. Farmer exhaustively mines the original novels for recurring themes, characters, character traits, plot twists and, in the case of Clark “Doc” Savage, the super-gadgets and super entourage. Working from the original stories about Tarzan and Doc Savage, Farmer told the “behind the scenes” stories of the characters and tales, including Doc’s offices on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. Farmer explains contradictions that crept into the original stories, down to the minutia of the layout of the Savage offices and labs, for example. Right about the time he was working on those two biographies, Farmer used his research to create an entire universe that meticulously connected those characters and many more, and the universe was based on just who was exposed to the Wold Newton meteorite. Vampires and crimefighters and shared universes Author Win Scott Eckert coined the term “Wold Newton Universe” in 1999 to wrap his head around the huge expanse of characters and worlds that sprang from Farmer’s work – and to note the ongoing additions to the universe. As Eckert writes on a page on the Philip José Farmer website, the conceit at the center of the Wold Newton Universe is that radiation from the meteorite caused mutations in those near the crash site, causing their descendants to have “extremely high intelligence and strength, as well as an exceptional capacity and drive to perform good, or, as the case may be, evil deeds.” Mutants, in other words, not unlike the most famous mutants in comic books and movies, the X-Men. Besides Holmes and his nemesis Professor James Moriarty, Wimsey and Savage, the literary figures singled out by Farmer and/or elaborated upon by Eckert include adventurers like Solomon Kane, Captain Blood and the Scarlet Pimpernel, explorer Professor Challenger, criminal mastermind Fu Manchu, crimefighters and detectives including the Shadow, Nero Wolfe, Philip Marlowe, James Bond, Travis McGee and Sam Spade. In most cases, Farmer created the lines of ancestry that connected all those figures to a handful of people who were nearby when the meteorite crashed. Over the decades, as other characters captured a place in pop culture, proponents of Farmer’s universe drew lines that connected them as well. Those include the Phantom of the Opera, Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, experimenter Dr. Moreau, Victor Frankenstein, Zorro, the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet (who were connected by blood in radio show scripts), Indiana Jones, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Perry Mason, the classic comic character the Spirit, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) Summers. Sometimes, particularly with Farmer’s original stories, the connections are meticulously grounded. Sometimes, particularly with the later connections, it’s just too much fun not to suggest that Spenser, for example, is connected to all these earlier characters of fearless upholders of the law with a strict moral code. To visit the Farmer website and scroll through the character timeline is to jump feet first down the most entertaining rabbit hole ever. Here’s Dr. Pretorius, famous from “Bride of Frankenstein.” Here’s Barnabas Collins of “Dark Shadows.’ Here’s Dracula! Link after link leads to improbable stories that connect damn near every fictional character you’ve ever loved. As I noted earlier, the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet were masked crimefighters popular in books, radio shows and TV. At some point mid-20th century, writers for the radio shows thought it would be fun to connect the two characters, whose secret identities were last-named Reid. They decided that the Hornet, newspaper publisher Britt Reid, was the nephew of Dan Reid, the Lone Ranger. A curious bit of extrapolation to promote the characters led to an extensive backstory that’s now been explored for decades, including as recently as 2017, when author Michael Uslan – an attorney as well as a writer who, like Kurt Vonnegut, Philip José Farmer and me, has an Indiana connection – wrote a Lone Ranger/Green Hornet comic book. (Uslan is also an executive producer of many “Batman” movies.) Typical of the meticulousness of the Wold Newton timeline is the entry for the Ranger and Hornet. The timeline begins in 1842 with the birth of Dan Reid and continues to more or less present day. The Wold Newton Universe is a labor of love and an obsession. It’s also funny: Eckert’s site leads to articles exploring many pop culture nooks and crannies. The 1984 film about adventurer “Buckaroo Banzai” – who is, of course, part of the bloodline – left unanswered a few questions, notably including one about a watermelon in an elaborate piece of machinery. Links on the site lead to an explanation from director W.D. Richter. But how could Spenser, the tough Boston private eye with a heart, be related to all these historical characters? In his “Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life,” Farmer theorized that Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was likely connected to the meteorite timeline. Spenser’s creator, Robert B. Parker, posited his character as the modern-day equivalent of Marlowe. Parker himself explored Marlowe’s history in a couple of novels drawn from the works of author Raymond Chandler. So it’s more of a literary bloodline than a bloodline mutated by an irradiating comet. It was only a matter of time before the Wold Newton Universe connected the dots and put Spencer in appropriate literary company. A good thing about the Wold Newton Universe is that none of it is (literally) set in stone. As Farmer himself wrote as he connected Marlowe to Doc Savage and the rest, “Readers who feel that the quality of genealogy is strained in this surmise are free to reject it.” View the full article

If you wish, you can blame it on The Great Gatsby. The 1920s have always seemed to carry a sheen of glamour. Daisy Buchanan’s beauty, Jay Gatsby’s wealth, the Great Neck mansions, it all dazzled readers so intensely that they didn’t quite grasp the ugliness of a car running down a woman in the road and a man shot in his own swimming pool. From the book: “Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. “ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ ” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.’ ” Yes, interestingly, Daisy cries over the gorgeous shirts, and almost 100 years after the publication of The Great Gatsby, the darkness of the 1920s, the feverish decade following a world war and the Spanish Flu pandemic, comes more into focus. The figures of the flapper and the flask, symbols of Prohibition, ride like hood ornaments on Gatsby’s yellow Rolls-Royce. But more and more people are peering under the hood. In the celebrated Jazz Age, there was virulent racism, political repression targeting radicals and unions, deep corruption that reached all the way to the White House, and of course the consuming greed that ratcheted ever higher until the Crash of 1929. Three works of nonfiction written in the last decade tell important truths the 1920s: The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, written by Daniel Okrent, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, by Adam Hochschild, and Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, written by David Grann and adapted into a soon-to-be-released film by Martin Scorsese. In fiction, a burst of mystery novels set in the 1920s hit bookshelves several years ago and that trend is deepening with crime fiction and other books that are more and more grappling with disturbing issues of the “Roaring Twenties.” In my novel, The Orchid Hour, the protagonist is a young Italian American widow dealing with prejudice in New York City who follows the trail of two strange deaths to the door of a nightclub in Greenwich Village, one displaying rare orchids and serving forbidden cocktails, that holds secrets of violence and corruption. Here are 12 other books that look at the grit beneath the glamour of the 1920s. As we struggle to recover from a pandemic in 2023, the decade has a definite resonance. Broadway Butterfly by Sarah Divello This novel dives into the real unsolved murder of 29-year-old model Dorothy King, a case that inspired the classic film The Naked City. In 1923, King’s lifeless body was found in the bedroom of a brownstone on West Fifty-Seventh, wearing only a silk chemise, a chloroform bottle beside her. The investigation of King’s life by police and journalists lays bare the precarious existence of New York City beauties who, even if they sashayed across Ziegfeld’s stage, earned little money and all too often ended up financed by sugar daddies or gangsters. Murder in the Park by Jeanne M. Dams An Italian antique dealer is murdered, and Elizabeth Fairchild, a widow living with her parents in Oak Park, Illinois, begins to investigate the death of her friend. It might sound like to plot of many a historical mystery, but Dams reveals the historic bigotry beneath the surface of idyllic Oak Park, specifically the conservative and Protestant Walosas Club, which is connected to an active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy Egan Speaking of the Ku Klux Kan, this nonfiction book reveals the shocking reach of the white supremacy group, with numerous elected officials, doctors and dentists, police, and community leaders assaulting and killing people at night—while busy “giving out money to churches and charities” during the day. Today many people associate the Harlem Renaissance with the Jazz Age, but the ugly reality is that the Klan, which sputtered out a decade after the Civil War, came roaring back fifty years later to seize real political power in the 1920s across the United States. Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson While there was no Prohibition in Great Britain, nightclubs flourished and set the scene for the country’s own version of the Jazz Age, with celebrants desperate to escape their memories of the Great War. The most fascinating character is nightlife queen Nellie Coker–inspired by the famed 1920s club owner Kate Meyrick—but there are many other compelling characters in this gorgeously written novel that some critics have dubbed “Dickensian.” A Botanist’s Guide to Flowers and Fatality by Kate Khavari Another mystery set in England in the 1920s comes from Khavari, following up her successful debut, A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poison. The protagonist is Saffron Everleigh, a young woman who disdains her aristocratic background for a career in botany. Her impressive skills are put to use in a murder investigation that uncovers the dependance on narcotics flourishing among the fabulous set in London—and other big cities in the 1920s. The Last Drop of Hemlock by Katharine Schellman The role of women in speakeasys is fascinating, whether it is the customers (women did not commonly socialize in bars pre-Prohibition) or the employees. Vivian Kelly, the protagonist, lives in a humble tenement while working as a waitress in the Nightingale when she decides to investigate the suspicious death of the club’s doorman. Her questions lead her deeper into the world of gangsters who formed an integral aspect of Prohibition nightlife. The Mistress of Bahtia House, by Sujata Massey Protagonist Perveen Mistry, a Parsi, is a quintessentially modern character in this award-winning series. As Bombay’s only woman solicitor, she resolutely deals with discrimination in all forms, ranging from clients unwilling to entrust their fate to a female to judges who won’t allow her to approach. But in the fourth book in the series, Mistry also must do battle with cultural condemnation of women who do not seem “pure” enough. And a serious antagonistic source is the British, who impose their will unfairly at every level of society. World War One destroyed the Hapsburg and Romanov empires, but the British empire survived and tightened its grip in the 1920s, primarily in India. Nothing but the Night: Leopold & Loeb and the Truth Behind the Murder That Rocked 1920s’ America, by Greg King and Penny Wilson It became fashionable to proclaim that the amoral 1920s with its worship of modernity and taste for Nietzsche were to blame for motivating rich young Chicagoans Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb to take the life of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in what seemed a senseless act. This nonfiction book de-mythologizes the well-educated, diffident duo, taking a deep look at their psychology along with providing a fascinating analysis of their defense waged by Clarence Darrow. Jazzed, by Jill Dearman Inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case, Dearman switched genders and altered the setting from Chicago to New York while keeping the pair precocious and Jewish and setting the story in 1924. The result is a page turner that delves into matters both dark (the dangerous science of eugenics that helped fuel anti-immigrant fervor) and light (the intoxication of jazz music) while making it painfully clear that if you were young and gay, you felt compelled to hide it from family, teachers, and the world during this seeming period of free love. Death Comes to Santa Fe, by Amanda Allen In the 1920s, progressives sometimes left the big city to set up communities across America, and such is the case in Allen’s mystery series. Solving the mystery is set against the interesting tensions caused by arts-minded modern young people who’ve arrived in Santa Fe, which during the time of the plot is caught up in the community’s annual festival of bonfires commemorating a Spanish governor who marched into town several centuries earlier. Murder Off Stage by Mary Miley In the 1920s the Palace Theatre was the Times Square nerve center for vaudeville and there were others catering to the most popular form of live entertainment in the United States. In this mystery, protagonist Jessie Beckett is a vaudeville performer turned movie script girl, which was a shrewd trajectory in 1926, when vaudeville had only a few years of popularity left and the film industry was on the verge of “talkies.” The mystery is packed with real people of this captivating world, which had its shadowy secrets far from the spotlights. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia This is not crime fiction but a fantasy inspired by Mexican folklore. Still, it deserves special attention for not just the imaginative plot driven by the mysteries of Mayan legend but the richly rendered and historically researched details that decisively place the story in the 1920s, a decade that saw Prohibition and Wall Street in America affect its neighbor, from Merida to Veracruz to Tijuana, where “Lady Temperance had no abode.” As Silvia Moreno-Garcia astutely says, “A country in flux is a country padded with opportunities.” *** View the full article

When I talk to readers—at bookstores, libraries, and even tea rooms—the one think I’m always asked is where do I get my ideas and how do I find my inspiration? Do I get zapped in the head with the proverbial thunderbolt? Do I wait patiently until a big idea sparks the neurons inside my brain? Or is my every day choc-a-block filled with unbridled creativity? Well, no. I actually spend most days trying to avoid writing. Here’s how it works: I get up at 8:00 AM and feed my dog (Lotus). Then I make breakfast for Dr. Bob (husband). I fast read the newspaper looking/hoping for ripped-from-the-headlines ideas, then watch Squawk Box on CNBC to see how lousy my investments are doing, all the while killing time so I don’t have to face my half-written manuscript. Eventually, I capitulate and go to my office where I check emails and respond accordingly. I pay special attention to emails from Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom where I dream about buying $1200 leopard print Manolo heels. I check in with Facebook and try to post something fun and amusing (maybe ridiculously priced leopard heels?) I stall some more and then open my manuscript and read the chapter I wrote yesterday, fearful that it’s mostly pap and gibberish. At this point I’m always shocked to find that 60 to 80% is actually viable. Am I inspired yet? Well, yes I am. And since I’m feeling much more confident about my work, I start pounding away at the keyboard, all the while spooling out workable ideas. Because the thing is, your imagination is a muscle that can be bent and stretched in so many delicious directions. And the more you use your imagination the more pliable and imaginative it becomes. Ideas, good ideas, are literally everywhere. Remember my checking the newspaper this morning? There were oodles of ideas there owing to the fact that people are so dang crazy and weird. Even magazines offer snippets of ideas. I once read about a celebrity whose first job was as a ghost on a “ghost train.” Did I use the ghost train bit in one of my mysteries? Absolutely, I did. And when a local historical society sponsored a “cemetery crawl” at Halloween I snapped up that idea too. Ditto on an article I read about traveling a country “Quilt Trail” (only I turned my quilt trail into a murderous affair). Think of all the authors who’ve snatched great ideas out of simple reality. Stephen King turned a rabid dog into Cujo. Michael Connelly took his days reporting the cop beat in LA and spun them into his Harry Bosch series. And Mary Higgins Clark was the first author to write about missing and abducted children in her breakout novel Where are the Children?” When you find a spark of an idea, grab it, horde it, and run with it. Create your own concept file filled with notes and clippings. Do research and read articles that pertain to your subject. And once you’ve got a solid idea, start working on your all-important outline. Begin with a descriptive paragraph of your book (kind of like a TV show logline), then expand it into a few pages. See what you’re doing? You’re turning a basic idea into the beginnings of a plot. Maybe you can even take that plot to 15 or 20 pages and start to home in on the exact direction your novel should take. Now go back and write your first chapter. This is where you go for broke. Your words and writing style need to grab your reader – scare , delight, or shock the hell out of them. Remember, you want to keep your reader coming back for more. Now bang away at your novel as fast and as hard as you can. Don’t worry about finding the perfect words or sentence structures, just keep writing even if you’re not one hundred percent sure of where you’re going. Eventually, as you work your way through this, you’ll figure out how to create turning points, darkest before dawn scenes, plot twists, and surprise endings. You’ll find your way, I know you will. When I have a good writing day—what I call falling down the rabbit hole—I often work for 7 or 8 hours straight until my eyes are bleary. And until I get a gentle nudge under my arm. Oh my, it’s my dog, Lotus. I’ve completely lost track of time and realize that she wants dinner (as does Dr. Bob). Looks like it’s quittin’ time for me. As for you, dig around and find a nugget of an idea. Then polish it up until it’s nice and shiny and you’re ready to log some serious time at your computer. If you do all this (and add your own magic touch) you’ll for sure turn out a decent short story, essay, or even a novel. One more thing. If you want to learn about writing from the masters, there are a few terrific books you should check out. My personal favorite is Stephen King on Writing from Scribner. Mr. King gives us a peek into how he got started and how he lays out a plot. I particularly loved the part where he says he simply “makes stuff up.” Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing (Bantam Books) shows you how to use what you see, hear, and live everyday as fodder for your creative writing. Then there’s Writing Mysteries: A Handbook by the Mystery Writers of America (Writers Digest Books). Here today’s top mystery writers share insights and ideas on writing. I mean, who wouldn’t want to take advice from Michael Connelly, Tony Hillerman, and Tess Gerritsen? Finally, there’s Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maas (Writers Digest Books). This powerhouse literary agent details the exact elements that all breakout novels share, then explains writing techniques such as creating larger-than-life characters and sustaining narrative tension. Ready to get to work? Of course you are. Best of luck with your writing! *** View the full article

When I moved into the basement in fifth grade, there were certain rules that had to be followed in order to stay safe. The light always had to be on at the bottom of the stairs. No amount of parental scolding could convince me to turn that light off, or to reach back into the hallway to flip the switch once I was free. The hall had to be taken at a sprint. While the idea of not showing fear seemed like a good one, speed was always preferable over bravado. Because once I hit the stairs to go up or closed my bedroom door, I was safe. But I could never, never look behind myself as I ran. That was the biggest rule of all. The most important, the most sacred, the most vital. What was I afraid of? Nothing bad ever happened to me in that basement (unless you count the time a boy asked me to a dance by filling my mortifyingly messy room with balloons). But the dark basement hallway radiated menace, and I respected that menace. I followed the rules. My sisters did the same, including the time I screamed in the hallway and my older sister just…stayed in her bedroom. Her door was shut, after all, so she was safe. Everyone had these rules as a kid. (“Everyone did not,” my brutally practical older sister just informed me, and yet she didn’t set foot in the basement hallway when I screamed…) My little sister was afraid of the spots of light you see when the lights go out, so she used to climb in my bed. The lights were still there, but as long as she was with me: safe. My kids can’t sleep without a blanket no matter how hot it is, because if a single limb is uncovered, a nebulous something can get them. But as long as the blanket is in place: safe. And as a kid and teen I could keep my parents from dying in their sleep as long as I told them “I love you,” every single night before they went to bed. Safe. There was the fear of everything the darkness held, and there were the rules that kept the darkness from hurting me. I think back on that hallway, the sheer irrationality of my fear, but also the absolute certainty that I was doing what I needed to. I knew there was nothing behind me in the hallway, just like I knew if I turned around to make sure, there would be something there. Those two ideas coexisted in my head, the rational and irrational perfectly at home, holding hands like twin girls in blue dresses asking if you want to come play. In Mister Magic, I tried to write a book that captures the same surreal coexistence of the known and unknown. I want to tap into something primal, the dream state of fear and wonder and awe that we existed in as a children, when the world was incomprehensible and filled with limitless threat and possibility. Where elemental magic existed alongside basic math, where fairies might visit in the night to take away the baby teeth abandoning us as we grew, where wishing on 11:11 could make the boy who sits in front of you in Mrs. Voss’s class have a crush on you, too, at least until he gets a haircut and you lose the strange fascination that had fallen on you like a spell. And honestly, part of my obsession with recapturing what it felt like to be afraid as a child is selfish. Childhood fear is overwhelming and filled with wonder and awe and terror and, for the most part, solved with the flick of a light switch or the click of a door latch. Adult fear is simple and brutal and devastating. I have gotten a letter from the IRS that no door could shield me from. I have listened to my dad’s cancer diagnosis that no amount of whispering “I love you” could protect him from. I have spent infinite moments holding an unconscious, seizing child, wondering if they were about to die and powerless to help them. And I have walked away from an organization that told me my entire eternal salvation depended on staying faithful. There was no magic in any of those moments, no tricks or rituals that could save me. No light to keep the darkness at bay. There was only the held breath, the desperate hope, the placement of one foot in front of the other because what can you do but keep walking toward the stairs out? And so, in fiction, I turn to horror softened with wonder. I tap into my childhood brain, so close to me still, and ask it: What might have been behind us in the hallway if we had ever been brave enough to look? What can I learn now by at last letting myself peer into the hidden spaces of the world that felt so close to the surface back then? What might have happened if I’d held my fear close as part of my heart and learned from it, rather than feeling ashamed of its existence? I don’t believe my older sister, by the way. I think she had these little rituals, these superstitions, these bargains with the unknown, too. It’s easy to forget, as you grow into adulthood and gain some semblance of actual control over your life. It’s easy to close the door on that hallway, looming ever longer and darker, waiting for you to stumble into it on accident now that you’ve forgotten its power. All it takes is one step over the threshold, away from a world where you’ve convinced yourself things make sense, where your fears are now devastatingly realistic but even harder to protect against. Give me back the dream logic of childhood, the power of racing down a hallway in the light, the talisman of the blanket over my feet, the barrier of a slammed bedroom door. Give me back my 11:11 wishes; I’ll use them all to be brave enough to stop and look at what’s been waiting in the dark of my childhood brain all this time. And, if you let me, I’ll take you with me. The darkness is still waiting for us, and there’s so much to learn inside. *** View the full article

The appeal of loss-of-innocence narratives lies, I think, in the way they invite us to experience a character’s seismic changes as they unfold—and in the way they can call up in vivid detail our own pasts. I suspect it was inevitable I would write a novel like Pet, that takes as its jumping-off point a deeply charismatic, glamorous woman who taught at my Catholic school. Every girl in my class wanted to be her, and every girl wanted to be her pet. This larger-than-life figure stayed with me for decades, and my memories of the intensity of our feelings around her sparked my story of manipulation and betrayal narrated by 12-year-old Justine. Child narrators can be tricky to get right, but every syllable of Kit de Waal’s debut My Name is Leon feels authentic. The novel tells the story of a biracial boy growing up in 1980s Britain—Action Man is in the toy shops, The Dukes of Hazzard is on TV, and Margaret Thatcher is in power. When Leon’s brother Jake is born, their mother Carol struggles to care for her sons; in the grip of post-natal depression, she succumbs to her own demons. As a result, Leon and Jake enter the foster care system, where Jake is quickly adopted—because he is an infant and because he is white. Leon, left to face a harsher reality, becomes acutely aware of the racial disparities around him. His foster mother is affectionate, but he cannot help overhearing the conversations she has with her sister: there’s no chance a family will want to adopt him. Some of the most moving passages in the book centre around Leon’s love for his baby brother. He imagines that ‘someone else is holding Jake and kissing him. Someone else is looking into the perfect blue of his perfect eyes. Someone else is smelling him and touching the soft skin on the back of his hand.’ We feel his aching sense of loss; we long for him to be reunited with Jake. De Waal’s Leon is a stunning act of ventriloquism, bringing him to authentic three-dimensional life without ever veering into sentimentality. This book broke my heart and mended it again. Kirsty Gunn’s debut Rain also features a superbly evoked child narrator. Twelve-year-old Janey spends summer with her family at the lake, passing ‘endless bright days of watery green’ with her little brother while their parents drink and their marriage cracks. Water suffuses this taut, luminous work, beginning with the title and leaking out to chill every page. The lush, claustrophobic descriptions of landscape—‘you were surrounded so closely by growth that you could have felt stifled by it, the way it pushed in on you, surrounded you with its dark odours’—take form alongside a mounting unease that permeates the story. When the shattering crisis comes, we know it will haunt Janey forever. It’s easy to see why Gunn’s dreamlike, poetic masterpiece heralded a major new talent. She brings an outstanding lightness of touch to this dark narrative of guilt, sacrifice, and mistakes that can’t be undone. Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow takes audacious liberties with structure and logic, with the story playing out in reverse. The opening scene sets the stage for a mind-bending read: bewildered protagonist Odilo Unverdorben, a German doctor, emerges ‘out of the blackest sleep’ to find himself on a bed surrounded by American doctors. Shortly afterwards, three orderlies deal with him ‘by means of electricity and air’, and then one of them kisses him: ‘I think I know the name of this kiss. It is called the kiss of life.’ Gradually it becomes clear to us: we are witnessing his resuscitation and death backwards. This riddle of a novel brims with questions, and Unverdorben himself reports ‘the sense of starting out on a terrible journey, towards a terrible secret’. What he does not know, at the strange start of this journey, is that in his earlier career he worked as a Holocaust doctor; the terrible secret the story hurtles towards is Auschwitz. The inversion of time forces a re-evaluation of cause and effect—in the camp, Unverdorben’s actions are ostensibly benevolent, and he seems to heal rather than exterminate. Yet he carries a constant sense of unease and self-condemnation, experiencing the repercussions of guilt without an obvious basis. The shunning of conventional linear progression may seem like an indulgent exercise in gimmickry, but in Amis’ hands the unsettling chronology is a genius device, underscoring the notion that evil is not always apparent at first glance, and that seemingly good actions can have dark origins. A profound exploration of memory and conscience. Rick Moody’s darkly comedic novel The Ice Storm is a compelling exploration of 1970s suburban discontent and familial disintegration set against the backdrop of a terrible storm. With its masterful storytelling and nuanced characters, the novel delves deep into themes of alienation, coming of age, and the breakdown of traditional values. The narrative revolves around two neighboring families, the Hoods and the Williams, whose lives intersect during a tumultuous Thanksgiving weekend. As severe weather descends on their Connecticut town, the characters find themselves trapped both physically and emotionally, their stasis mirroring the frozen landscape outside. Moody gives voice to the individual struggles and desires of each family member, exposing their secrets, disillusionments, and attempts to break free from their suburban monotony. ‘The idea of betrayal was in the air,’ he observes. ‘The Summer of Love had migrated, in its drug-resistant strain, to the Connecticut suburbs about five years after its initial introduction.’ His portrayal of adolescent sexual awakening is particularly powerful; the young characters grapple with dangerous desires that seem almost to call up the chaos of the storm. Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, set in 1970s Michigan, also chips away the façade of smalltown America. A haunting evocation of the time when we are no longer children but not yet adults, it is told in the collective voice of a group of neighbourhood boys obsessed with the tragic Lisbon sisters. The girls, particularly the risk-taking Lux, embody an unattainable ideal of beauty and innocence. The boys are captivated by their enigmatic allure and yearn to understand them, yet the sisters remain distant and elusive. This unattainability becomes a source of both fascination and frustration for the boys—and for the reader, it taps into the profound longings of adolescence. Like Moody, Eugenides explores the suffocating nature of suburban life and the constraints it places on individuals. The overprotective Lisbon parents impose stringent rules on their daughters, and the house itself functions as a symbol of entrapment and isolation: ‘on a shelf above the radiator, five pairs of bronzed baby shoes preserved for all time the unstimulating stage of the Lisbon girls’ infancy’. The language of the novel is often melancholic, dreamlike: ‘For hours Mary would sit before the mirror, watching her face swim through the alterations of counterfeit worlds.’ These lyrical descriptions enhance the novel’s ethereal atmosphere and sense of nostalgia, but Eugenides also crafts a compelling plot. Equal parts mystery and meditation on the fragility and transience of youth, this is a story that lingers. *** View the full article

I’m not sure what the lowest point in my “fertility journey” has been. Was it the time I bought herbal gummies from Target that the garish pink label claimed had been prayed over? Was it all the increasingly personal, desperate posts I read through in the forum of my fertility app — which is apparently being investigated by the FTC? Or was it during one of the several horror movies about motherhood I’ve recently watched in which I found myself jealously musing, “Who cares if I give birth to a demon child? I’d love it anyway!” Because there have been a lot of horror movies about having babies these days, and, for some reason, their makers think we’re all more scared of creepy children than our own bodies. When I picked up Delicate Condition (Sourcebooks Landmark, August 2023) by Danielle Valentine — the inspiration for the next season of American Horror Story — I was honestly pretty wary. It was described as a feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby centering around an actress on the edge of 40 going through IVF while increasingly becoming wary that someone is out to stop her from conceiving. The paranoia only gets worse after she finally gets pregnant — despite an apparent miscarriage — and gets the feeling that her baby is somehow… wrong. That description gave me pause. Probably because as a woman on the brink of 39 who wouldn’t mind having a baby I found myself less interested in the various mysteries the book promised and more jealous that a fictional character could afford IVF. Batty, I know, but you go into a psychosis when you’re trying without success to do something you’ve always assumed would be easy. So easy that you spent most of your life trying to avoid it. Sure, I would have liked to have gotten married and started trying for a family years ago, but you never know when you’re going to find your person. I just happened to find mine at 32 and get married at 34. Then I had the audacity to want to secure financial stability — and maybe enjoy marriage for a while — before inviting a tiny tyrant into our home. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that conceiving isn’t all that easy; I have plenty of friends who have struggled. Still, no only really tells you how hard it is to do something that your body was essentially made to do. I mean, people get accidentally pregnant all the time on TV shows! It was kind of a thing when I was growing up, a mechanism to scare girls into avoiding sex, which always led to a baby, which then led to your life being “ruined.” Never mind that we’re never told the mechanics of how a baby is actually made. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t understands the ins and outs of ovulation before I started tracking mine. And according to my “fertility friends” on that FTC-challenged app, I’m not alone. People are asking some seriously weird things on there, guys. And I get it! For some reason, women’s bodies are shrouded in mystery — despite the fact that the Supreme Court has deemed it necessary to regulate them. From what’s safe to eat, drink, and do during pregnancy to why certain people struggle to conceive, it’s all kind of just one big question mark. And we’re expected to just operate under that haze, decanting pints of blood — and money — in doctors’ offices under the spectre of cutesy signs emblazoned with words like “Hope” and “Dream.” And, in the end, a not insubstantial number of couples struggling to have a child are given the oh-so-helpful diagnosis of “unexplained fertility.” Now that’s a horror movie title. And that’s not even getting into how expensive all this is – not only the efforts to have a child but the actual child itself. Daycare is also a good horror movie title. Despite my misgivings, though, I ended up cracking open Delicate Condition. After all, I’m a fan of both Valentine’s books and AHS. Imagine my surprise when I found myself reading not just a trussed-up reimagining of Mia Farrow’s swan song, but looking into a mirror. Yes, the book’s protagonist Anna Alcott can afford IVF, and, yes, she finds herself doing and eating some very strange things (I don’t want to spoil too much here) that suggest her baby might be a little off. But she also finds herself dealing with just as many mysteries as I have. There’s the frustration with medical professionals who seem completely unable to give you any answers without poking and prodding and doing increasingly invasive tests that seem to only drain your bank account — and your hope. There’s why it’s apparently OK to chide and shame women for waiting to have a child until they’re ready, even if that’s later in life. And there’s just your own body in general, which women are raised to hate and revile until it becomes a vessel for another human. As I neared the end of the book and inevitable happened — the baby comes and she’s not exactly not evil — I found myself, again, worried it’d end with that old cliché. The one that’s frustrated me during my lowest moments: that this woman had the audacity to want a child against all odds, and, for that, she’d be punished by birthing Lucifer. Thankfully, though, Valentine is smarter than that. The baby comes and there’s something different about her, sure — but Alcott is no spiraling Rosemary, unaware of what she’s birthed and ruled by those around her. Her eyes are open. Maybe because she’s just a great writer, or because she’s had a child herself, Valentine understands that the horror isn’t in the tangible, but in the unknowing. And that’s more terrifying that any demon baby I’ve ever seen on screen. View the full article

With the benefit of hindsight, the 1920s seem like an odd reprieve from the rest of that century. After the most devastating war the world had ever known, and before a global economic cataclysm and a second world war on top of it, the U.S. and western Europe saw a brief golden age of glamorous parties, economic prosperity and flourishing arts and culture. Soundtracking it all was what has been called the first American art form, jazz, a preview of the century’s American cultural hegemony. The truth, of course, was not quite as simple. Even as the music they invented came to define the decade, Black Americans had to contend with the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. And even before the Wall Street crash that closed out the decade, the economic have-nots remained even if they were largely glossed over. The fascist ideology that spread through Europe and threatened the globe didn’t come from nowhere, and was waiting in the wings for much of what we consider the good times, as two crime dramas set in 1920s Europe make clear. The ashes of World War 1 are everywhere in BBC’s “Peaky Blinders.” Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), who leads the eponymous Birmingham gang, suffers from severe, untreated PTSD, as does his older brother Arthur and practically every man they know. In the show’s third season, a Sicilian-American mafioso (Adrien Brody) explains to a henchman that “over here, everything is about the war.” Apart from unionist firebrand Ada (Sophia Rundle), the Shelbys are initially resolutely apolitical, as Tommy deftly manipulates everyone from the Communist Party to White Russian exiles to Irish Republicans for his own ends. All that changes, however, with the introduction in the show’s fifth season of Oswald Mosley (Sam Claflin), the non-fictional British aristocrat who founded the British Union of Fascists. By this point, Tommy has schemed his way into a seat in Parliament with the Labour Party, and Mosley sees a potential kindred spirit in Tommy’s populist rhetoric. The global depression (which opens that season) proved a major recruiting boon for the far-right, reeling in those burned by capitalism but seeking a scapegoat other than the system itself, leading to the social-democratic adage “antisemitism is the socialism of fools.” Mosley, who ingratiates himself with Tommy through blackmail, is an adversary unlike any the Shelbys have encountered before. Past villains have had political connections or a capacity for shocking violence, but the show’s fascists are the first to truly demonstrate both. The Billy Boys, the far-right Glaswegian gang that act as enforcers for Mosley, make their first appearance in a burst of brutality, beating the Shelbys’ Romany ally Aberama Gold (Aiden Gillen) and murdering his beloved son in a clearing. It’s a shocking scene that calls to mind Upton Sinclair’s definition of fascism, “capitalism plus murder”—but then, that could be a definition of gangsterism as well. “Peaky Blinders” is also merciless in its indictment of the “good guys” of the 20th century for their complicity in the rise of fascism; when Tommy, alarmed by Mosley’s ideology, takes his concerns to a contact in military intelligence, he’s informed that the government already knows, and sees Mosley as a useful cudgel against communism. In the show’s next season, Tommy meets Boston kingpin Jack Nelson (James Frecheville), a confidant of President Roosevelt seeking to win the president’s support for fascism. Nelson is an obvious stand-in for the notoriously Nazi-curious Joe Kennedy Sr., although due to the nature of the show, he personally gets his hands much dirtier than the Kennedy patriarch likely ever did. The tension of the show derives from the conflict between the Shelbys and their enemies, but also from our knowledge in the 21st century of just how charmed western civilization was by fascism, and how close we came to inviting it in the front door like a vampire. It’s less of a surprise that fascism looms large over Sky1’s “Babylon Berlin,” based on Volker Kutscher’s Gereon Rath mysteries. The series, after all, is set in the Weimar Republic. But when actual members of the Nazi Party make their first appearance in the series, it comes almost as a shock. We first see them towards the end of the show’s second season, by which point the primary antagonists have been Soviet diplomats and the Black Reichswehr, the real-life putschists who sought to rearm the German military in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. The hapless maid Greta Overbeck (Leonie Benesch) is the show’s first character to catch sight of them, spotting the man she believed to be her communist boyfriend in a crowd of brownshirts. By then, she’s been manipulated into planting a bomb in the home of her employer, the Jewish chief of the political police, only to realize too late that it was a Nazi operation to be blamed on the communists, a chilling preview of the Reichstag Fire the party will use to consolidate power in 1933. The show’s Nazis, just like the real thing, may appear to come from nowhere, but they’ve been here far longer than we realized. We get an even more ominous portent in the show’s third season with the introduction of Horst (Julius Feldmeier), a pimp and fascist street brawler, who might seem unremarkable but for the fact that he shares a name and biography with Horst Wessel, the brownshirt whose death in 1930 gave him martyr status in the Nazi movement. Indeed, one of the biggest sources of tension in the show is that we know nothing these individual characters do will prevent the fragile republic from falling. The conservative military officers who were the primary threat at the start of the show will be remembered a century hence mostly for their foolish conviction that they could bend the Nazis to their will. Traditional organized crime, as represented by the mysterious mob boss known as “the Armenian,” will be suppressed and attributed to malignant Jewish and American influence. And our heroes, the detectives Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) and Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), plug away at solving murders, unaware they’re less than a decade away from a regime that will bureaucratize mass murder. The knowledge of the history to come can make these shows a rough watch. But they also remind us that while fascism has a talent for shapeshifting—from a sneering British baronet to German street toughs—its antisemitic demagoguery and gleeful bloodlust remain the same, and can re-emerge in any seemingly civilized society that doesn’t know what to look for. View the full article

It’s a sensible writer who pays close attention to the clichés of their chosen genre, however untrue or outlandish they might be. If you want to go off-piste, even for a few pages, you first need to know what on-piste looks like—you need to know the location of the flags that mark the route most commonly taken. In the case of espionage, what are those flags? That spying is a dirty game played by gentlemen. That agents roam the world dispensing a violent justice. That they operate with near-total independence from the agencies that employ them, agencies that are all-knowing and all-seeing, uncoupled from any legal framework and with access to frontier-busting technology (rather than vast, creaking bureaucracies with a poor track record for spotting the next big threat in time to do anything about it). As someone who has recently exited the profession, there’s one cliché that preoccupies me these days above all others: that it’s impossible to leave. Something happens to the spy in the field, or so they say. They are branded, their DNA is reconfigured, they lose all capacity for innocence and wonder. They see things they can’t unsee. They become enmeshed in a web of legal obligations, signed in blood, that require them to abandon their new lives and return to operational duty when the call comes through. Whatever the reason, theirs is a uniquely hard profession to walk away from. Once a spy, always a spy. Can this possibly be true? I know of spies who have left the profession to become schoolteachers, doctors, lawyers, police officers. I remember one who became an acrobat, another who teaches poker. The former chief of MI6 is now a podcaster. As far as I am aware, none of them have been stalked down by disgruntled ex-agents or called back in to be interrogated about what really happened on the Polish-Lithuanian border in 1976. What’s more, many spies leave the profession because they’re tired of the secret world; they pass through the door marked ‘exit’ at a sprint. They can’t wait to shrug off the habit of secrecy and do something they can talk about over the dinner table. The idea that these people are marked for life, that they will always be defined by that one job, is surely absurd. Let’s remember too that the agencies have a stake in keeping the ‘once a spy, always a spy’ idea alive. They want their former employees to consider themselves still on the team, since they constitute a vast, skilled, invisible and cheap workforce that can be mobilized at the drop of a hat, a workforce that can be relied upon to grant a quiet favor or share any useful intelligence they come across. Just as crucially, the agencies want their former employees to remain mindful of the penalties imposed on those who disclose state secrets. The ‘once a spy, always a spy’ line can be spun two ways: if you’re on the team for life, then you’re bound by team rules for life. This is surely what Putin had in mind when he said that there was no such thing as an ex-KGB agent, as Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal found out to their cost. We’re agreed, then: it’s a myth. The idea that you—that I, more to the point—can’t make a clean getaway is just another fanciful story told about the world’s second-oldest profession. For some reason, though, I have found myself writing a novel —The Man in the Corduroy Suit—in which no one gets away cleanly. The spy who is poisoned, the spy who investigates the poisoning, even the spy who allegedly did the poisoning—none of them finds a way to transition smoothly into civilian life. While writing the book, I found myself thinking about another ex-spy. In The Honorary Consul, a hostage—Charlie Fortnum —watches from the corner of a dark hut as his kidnapper cooks eggs. Graham Greene (MI6, 1941-1944) writes: ‘As he held two half shells over the pan there was something in the position of the fingers which reminded Fortnum of that moment at the altar when a priest breaks the Host over the chalice.’ Fortnum later challenges his kidnapper. ‘Once a priest, always a priest, Father. I spotted you when you broke those eggs over the dish.’ ‘Once a priest, always a priest’. Doesn’t this ring true? Aren’t there in fact some professions that seep into the bones? And in an ideal world, don’t we want this, don’t we want to do jobs that change us and stay with us, as evidence that they’re worth doing in the first place, that we’re doing them properly? What kind of priest would shed all their priestly qualities upon leaving? And what kind of spy? *** View the full article

“Yo Pipes, my cousin’s friend thinks you’re hot.” Piper glanced up from her phone, her eyes glazed over. She was texting, but when Dupont didn’t go away, she slid her phone into the back pocket of her jeans and sighed. “What now?” Her eyes bounced off of him and to the crowd of students making their way out the front doors. The burden of having a popular sister… I rolled my eyes. Dupont stepped in front of her, blocking her view so he could have her full attention. “My cousin’s friend. He wants to know if you want to hang out at the mall sometime.” I finished loading my books into my backpack and slammed my locker making them both jump. I gave Piper a look, and we started walking. It was three o’clock on a Friday, the bell had rung, and it wasn’t raining. We could make it home dry if we hurried. “Why would I want to hang out with your cousin’s friend?” Dupont shrugged like he didn’t really care, but I could tell that wasn’t the case. He was stuck to Piper’s side, hedging her like I’d seen him do on the court. “Shouldn’t you be at practice?” I asked. He ignored me. Chris Dupont was a hustler in a beanie. Piper felt comfortable giving him an attitude because she was higher on the food chain; if she didn’t laugh at his jokes, no one would. I, on the other hand, was afraid of him. He had a way of knowing your weakness and using it against you. “Stop acting like you’re too good for people, Piper, damn! You want to hang out with him, trust me. He’s a senior. Not at this school…” I rolled my eyes, anticipating how long this would take. I’d skipped lunch to finish my algebra homework, and I was hungry. “Pipe, let’s go.” I nagged, tugging on her arm. Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, she took it out, frowning at the screen. For a moment her face looked so distraught I wanted to ask her what was wrong? My hand was still on her arm, she shrugged it off, annoyed. I felt stupid: she’d been like this with me: vague…distant. “Who’s your cousin’s friend?” My sister looked pointedly at Dupont. “And how exactly does this creeper know me?” Excerpt continues below cover reveal. She started walking, long rose-gold waves bouncing against her back. I kept mine short and used gel to matte it down–which made my hair look darker than hers. We launched after her like minnows, darting through bodies to keep up. I looked over at Dupont resentfully, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Come on, Piper, everyone knows you. At all the schools. Before you danced for Jesus, you danced for us!” That earned him a scalding look. Piper quickened her pace, but he slid into step beside her, knocking me out of the way. I harrumphed but hung back while he finished his appeal. “I didn’t know you were matchmaking now,” she smarted without looking at him. I was endlessly impressed by how cool she was without even trying. How did we share a womb? We were fifteen feet away from the door and freedom. I could practically taste my sandwich… “He’s on the Wildcats football team, but that is all I’m saying.” That’s all he had to say. Piper was interested. I stepped over someone’s lunch, bologna and mayo ground into the concrete. She was barely fifteen, but she had a definite type. Lately, my formerly boy crazy sister’s type had been Jesus. The school was behind us now; we walked with the flow of traffic, me holding the straps of my backpack as I trailed them. “Why can’t he ask me himself?” Her voice was different—Dupont owned her in that moment. He seemed to know it too because he danced around, giving her the finger until she pinched him playfully on the arm. He had her full attention. “Ouch! Okay! I’ll tell you!” he said, laughing. “His parents took his phone away, that’s all I know. He saw you at the game and asked about you.” “What game?” I heard her ask, though she knew exactly which one. Piper liked that, the chase was her game. “His last name is Crimball.” Dupont had just dropped her crush’s name, and she looked bored. Piper had no reaction. I had to give it to her, girl was hardcore. “Why would I want to meet him?” Dupont started laughing. He bent over like one of those dancing sock puppets and slapped his knee twice before straightening up. “Because every bitch in that school would spread for Crimball.” Lifting his arms straight up, he twisted his torso left, then right, then left again. His back cracked, and I frowned. He was right, but Piper was a sophomore and Matt was a senior. My sister was beautiful, smart, and talented, but so were plenty of juniors and seniors. “I have to give him an answer,” Dupont said. “Don’t shoot the messenger… How about Saturday?” We stopped at a red light as Piper considered this. “Oh, all right then, I guess I can.” She looked back at me like I was her personal assistant. “We were going to the mall anyway, remember? I guess we could say hey or whatever…” I nodded dutifully. There were spicy pickles in the fridge, I could use the leftover roast beef from dinner and— “Awesome,” Dupont said. He smiled at Piper, shot an air gun at me, and shuffled off to go hustle someone else. “We were going to see a movie,” I said as the light turned green. I’d been waiting to see that movie for weeks, and Piper promised she’d go with me. “Not anymore,” Piper shot back. I recognized the look on her face and knew I was fucked. “You take Sundays, now you want Saturdays as well?” “It’s not my fault we go to church, Iris. I just leaned into what Gran made us do.” She was right but I didn’t care. We both used to complain about church all the time, then all of a sudden I was the only one complaining. It felt like a betrayal: for her to start liking something we’d hated together. * Later that night, when I was helping Gran make dinner, she asked if I was excited to see the movie. We were moving around each other to get to things, the kitchen a mere sliver of space. I heard the hiss of something in the frying pan, the tv playing in the living room. The commercial was about yogurt and everyone was dancing. “We’re going to the mall instead.” I was dismissive as I stood over the sink, rinsing vegetables. Gran leaned over from the stove to stare at me. She was wearing a lavender sweater set underneath a lime green apron. “You were born six minutes apart. Not six years, you know…you don’t have to go along with whatever she wants.” “It’s fine, Gran.” I could hear the exasperation in my own voice. I dumped lettuce into a bowl with a handful of cherry tomatoes, and grabbed the Ranch from the fridge. “Will there be boys?” She held up the spatula as she glared at me, meat popping in oil. “You look like a neon demon,” I told her. “Don’t let her out of your sight,” Gran said firmly. “I mean it. I’m not raising her babies.” I couldn’t voice the irony even if I wanted to—that Gran was referring to the twin who actually went to church. Regardless, if Gran told me not to let her out of my sight, that’s exactly what I’d do. “What about me, who watches me?” She rolled her eyes. “You take care of yourself, it’s my favorite thing about you…” I was so shocked by her words that I froze. What a thing to say, I thought, hands cradling the wooden salad bowl. Gran flipped the patties, oblivious. __________________________________ Excerpted from Good Half Gone by Tarryn Fisher. Copyright © 2024 by Tarryn Fisher. Published by Graydon House Books. View the full article

My latest book, Just Another Missing Person, is about Julia, a police officer. On the first night on a new missing person’s case, she gets in her car, exhausted, looks up, and in the rearview mirror sees a man in the back wearing a balaclava. He says only one word: ‘Drive.’ After this, he hands her a note, which says he knows her worst secret, and she must do everything he tells her to do on the case she’s on, starting by planting evidence. Julia, who covered up a crime for her daughter the previous year, has no choice but to comply. Writing it got me thinking about this theme in crime novels and how it really ratchets up the stakes — what parent wouldn’t protect their own child? Here are five (other!) novels which do it brilliantly: The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell – part crime thriller, part love story between mother and daughter, this is a novel about a long-gone set of missing teenagers and a sign that turns up saying ‘Dig Here.’ I would read Lisa Jewell’s shopping list, but I especially loved this. Reputation by Sarah Vaughan – an MP is put on trial for murder – but is she innocent, or protecting her daughter, or perhaps (somehow?) both? Vaughan writes compellingly about life in the political public eye: I’m sort of amazed Emma Webster is a character and not a real person. Hostage by Clare Mackintosh – this taut and surprisingly unpredictable thriller asks the question: would you kill two hundred people to save your child? What I loved most about it is that it is really a novel about the who and the why, rather than the dilemma itself. Everyone Here Is Lying by Shari Lapena – a safe neighbourhood, a missing child, and a whole host of parents protecting children, wives protecting husbands, and nefarious and shady characters hiding in plain sight. I loved it! The Pact by Jodi Picoult – and oldie but a goodie, and perhaps (personally) the book I think about the most while writing. It’s haunting and moody and perfect. Two teenagers make a suicide pact, but one of them survives. This is a story really about the parental friendships you make when your kids get on, and where your loyalty lies when things go wrong. There’s a scene in this book that you will remember forever. *** View the full article

There is comfort in reading a whodunnit led by a talented detective. We know what we’re getting with a Sherlock or a Miss Marple—the next moment of genius is a few paragraphs away, and the villain will be unmasked in the end. But I’m not here to talk about that sort of book. I’m here for the reluctant detectives, the unlucky souls dragged toward clues kicking and screaming. They have better things to do with their time than chasing wayward criminals, but are given no other choice. This dilemma delivers an edge of adventure, wondering what crazy thing they’ll do next, either willingly or by force. The reluctant sleuth is not usually a genius, and often is a bit of a mess. This normalcy and humanity are what makes them relatable, with personalities running the gamut from desperate and violent to hapless and hilarious. Most are amateurs out of their depth. But, in the exception that proves the rule, they can also be professionals with their crime-busting days behind them, dragged back into the fray against their will. Their motivations for sleuthing vary. Maybe their life depends on solving the crime, or they’ve been accused and must clear their name. Maybe they’re revenge sleuthing, or scared-out-of-their-wits sleuthing, or last-resort sleuthing. An internal or external force urges these unlucky characters out of their comfort zones and into the criminal world. My debut novel, I Know What You Did, centers on reluctant detective Petal Woznewski. She’s built an introverted life in New York City, hiding out from her past, until a bestselling book exposes her darkest secrets. She’d much rather be curled up with a bag of Takis and a beer, streaming a Keanu Reeves movie, but the book has other ideas. She returns to her hometown of Madison, WI to investigate the mysterious author and their reasons for exposing her—before everything she’s been hiding comes to light. Read on for a selection of books featuring some of my favorite reluctant detectives, each avoiding their book’s central mystery for their own—often messy—reasons. Burglars Can’t Be Choosers by Lawrence Block Reluctant detective: Bernie Rhodenbarr, The Gotta Get Out of this Mess Sleuth He is: under arrest, and the only way out is to solve the crime. He’d rather be: stealing stuff. Bernie is a burglar—and an entertaining one. He doesn’t quite have a heart of gold, but it’s at least sterling silver. His stomping ground is the New York City of the late seventies, a time before cell phones and GPS and ubiquitous security cameras. In this first in a long-running series, Bernie has gotten himself in a fix: a dead body turns up in the apartment he’s been contracted to break into, and it looks like he’s the murderer. Thanks to a crooked cop he’s able to escape arrest, but must remain on the run. The only way he can clear his name—and return to his life of gentlemanly theft—is to find the real culprit. Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby Reluctant detectives: Ike and Buddy Lee, The Revenge-Hungry Sleuths They are: furious, and won’t rest until the baddies are brought down. They’d rather be: making amends with their sons. Ike and Buddy Lee don’t get along, even though they have quite a bit in common. Both men are ex-cons living in Virginia, their sons were married to each other, and neither knew how to deal with children so different from themselves. When their sons are brutally gunned down and the police stop investigating, the men team up in the name of vengeance. Full of regret over their refusal to accept their sons in life, they channel all their energy into discovering who killed them and why. Rage and devastation infuse every action as they tangle with a dangerous motorcycle gang, and nothing is off limits if it means justice will be served. Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand Reluctant detective: Cass Neary, The Desperate Sleuth She is: stranded, and solving the crime is a matter of survival. She’d rather be: getting high and taking gritty photos. Cass is a once-cult-famous photographer, now self-medicating with drugs and alcohol while working at a New York City bookstore. When a friend offers her a way back into the photography world—a job interviewing a famously reclusive photographer at her island home off the coast of Maine—she accepts because she has no other choice. On the tight-knit island she is an outsider, and her interview subject isn’t cooperating. As stormy weather and evil forces conspire to keep her stranded there, Cass wades through secrets and horrors. To get out alive, she’ll need to discover what the island’s residents are hiding. The Killing Floor by Lee Child Reluctant detective: Jack Reacher, The Un-Retired Sleuth He is: seasoned and exhausted, but his well-earned retirement will have to wait. He’d rather be: wandering the country listening to the blues. In this first in the famous series, Reacher is ex-military police, eager to explore America—something he never got to do growing up overseas. He doesn’t make it far on this post-retirement road trip before arriving in small-town Margrave, Georgia. Dead bodies start to turn up and Reacher, the only stranger in town, is arrested. But something isn’t right—not in affluent yet empty Margrave, and not in the police station where he’s been locked up. If Reacher wants to get back on the road, he’ll have to convince the new police chief of his innocence, and figure out what’s going on in Margrave. Killing Me by Michelle Gagnon Reluctant detective: Amber Jamison, The Victim-Turned-Sleuth She is: almost the Pikachu Killer’s next victim. She’d rather be: staying under the radar. Amber is living the low-key life of a college student when she gets pulled into an unmarked white van—and that’s just the start of her troubles. She escapes a serial killer with the help of a mysterious savior, but her sketchy past threatens to become public in the ensuing investigation. Rather than involve the police—who would ask inconvenient questions—she heads for Vegas, trying to evade scrutiny, on the trail of the killer and her savior, hoping to discover how everything is intertwined. All Her Little Secrets by Wanda Morris Reluctant detective: Ellice Littlejohn, The Coerced Sleuth She is: trying to work, but the evil corporate honchos have other ideas. She’d rather be: working at a company that appreciates all of who she is. Ellice is a lawyer with secrets—about her childhood in rural Georgia and her current romance with the boss. She doesn’t let these secrets get in the way of doing her job well, until the day her boss turns up dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. The man hated guns; she knows something isn’t right with his death. As conspiracies arise, the heads of the Atlanta-based company have her trapped—she must do what they want or they will expose her. But Ellice doesn’t like being told what to do by racist blackmailers. She must gather evidence for the police if she wants to stay alive and out of jail. *** View the full article

Here are 25 of the best novels to come out in paperback over the past three months, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. Alaina Urquhart, The Butcher and the Wren (Zando) “Dark, twisty, full of authentic detail, it’ll have you listening to the night in an entirely different way.” –Neil Nyren, Booktrib Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age (Berkley) “This Golden Girls meets James Bond thriller is a journey you want to be part of.” –Buzzfeed Winnie M. Li, Complicit (Atria) “Writer, producer, and activist Li draws on her experience in the film industry to bring authenticity and raw honesty to her second novel, a timely page-turner that explores the emotional impact of sexual assault.” –Booklist Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You Home (Mulholland) “[THE DEVIL TAKES YOU HOME] cycles between pulse-pounding thriller, diabolical horror, and violent narcoliterature…. Readers captivated by the characters’ motivations and the occult pyrotechnics will quickly devour it whole.”–Kirkus Reviews Jason Mosberg, My Dirty California (Simon & Schuster) “Jody is thrilled when younger brother Marty arrives to visit him and their father in Pennsylvania, then horrified to find them both murdered the next day. His search for their killer sends him to Marty’s Los Angeles home, where a stash of disturbing videos reveals the city’s uglier aspects and leads him to more mysteries—e.g., a documentary filmmaker who thinks humanity is living in a simulation—that might help solve his.” –Library Journal Lisa Unger, Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six (Park Row) “Secrets abound in Lisa Unger’s latest thriller, which is so well crafted, you’ll be tempted to read all 400 pages in one go.” –BookPage Cherie Priest, Flight Risk (Atria) “This lighthearted mystery with its travel agent/psychic and her occasional, unofficial partner is a good choice for cozy mystery lovers, animal lovers, and fans of the author. Recommended.” —Library Journal Tom Bradby, Yesterday’s Spy (Atlantic Monthly) “Atmospheric, informative and flawlessly plotted.” ―Sunday Ava Berry, Double Exposure (Pegasus) “An intoxicating throwback. This highly cinematic modern-day mystery, which revolves around a 70-year-old unsolved murder, is a sparkling homage to Hollywood’s Golden Age.”–Shelf Awareness Tyrell Johnson, The Lost Kings (Vintage) “Absence and loss permeate Tyrell Johnson’s THE LOST KINGS in a way that surprised and moved me multiple times over the course of the novel. . . . I loved how the twists felt psychologically true, a reflection of the way buried trauma always resurfaces, inflicting damage and then lancing the wounds.” –Sarah Weinman, The New York Times Carolyne Topdijian, The Hitman’s Daughter (Agora) “Topdjian’s debut thriller is intense with foreboding and an eerie sense of place. The past and present perspectives captivate the reader and connect brilliantly to reveal a shocking conclusion.”–Booklist Hank Phillippi Ryan, The House Guest (Forge) “Binge-worthy…. This cat-and-mouse story will have readers wondering who is the cat and who is the mouse.” –Library Journal Robert Lloyd, The Poison Machine (Melville House) “A deliciously preposterous adventure…” –The New York Times Book Review Conner Habib, Hawk Mountain (Norton) “Habib brings rich psychological insight to his characters, expertly observing how the conflicts of youth persist into Todd and Jack’s present. …[T]his dramatic tale soars.”–Publishers Weekly Janice Hallett, The Twyford Code (Atria) “Every page is a joy, with laugh-out-loud moments even as the plot becomes more outlandish, and the startling final reveal crowns Hallett as the queen of unreliable narrators.”–Sunday Times Kotaro Isaka, Three Assassins (Abrams) Three Assassins feels like a fever dream that makes sense when you’re in it, but whose strange contours linger long after you wake up.” –The New York Times Book Review, Editors Choice Pick Dwyer Murphy, An Honest Living (Penguin Books) “Set amid New York’s rare-book trade, this slow-burning début crime novel is also an atmospheric homage to the film Chinatown.” –The New Yorker, Best Books of 2022 Alice Feeney, Daisy Darker (Flatiron) “A sinisterly satisfying play on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None…Readers will be intrigued by the setting, the action, and the question of whether or not they can trust narrator Daisy.”–Booklist, starred review Riley Sager, The House Across the Lake (Dutton) “It’s a familiar psychological thriller structure–until everything changes. . . . A page-turning climax.” –USA Today Michael Connelly, Desert Star (Grand Central) “Thrilling… Both cases require deep dives into the past; both lead to great action scenes; and, as always, Connelly displays his encyclopedic knowledge of the latest forensics… Ranks up there with Connelly’s best.”–Publishers Weekly Catherine Ryan Howard, Run Time (Blackstone) “If you’re just dipping your toe into horror, Run Time is a good place to start.” –Washington Independent Review of Books Sarah Pearse, The Retreat (Penguin Books) “This thriller novel is so dark and tense, it’s the perfect read for anyone lounging in the sun this summer, grateful that your holiday isn’t so chaotic.”–Cosmopolitan (London) Katharine Schellman, Last Call at the Nightingale (Minotaur) “Fizzy . . . Vivian is a terrific character, plucky and resourceful, determined to choreograph a different life for herself.”–New York Times Book Review Kaoru Takamura, Lady Joker, Vol. 2 (Soho) “A sprawling, absorbing saga . . . Examines a vast web of characters affected by a kidnapping and sabotage case in Tokyo. The action moves fluidly from news desks to corporate offices, as the police and press track a shadowy crime group calling itself Lady Joker.” –The Washington Post *** Catherine Steadman, The Family Game (Ballantine) “[A] tricky psychological puzzle . . . It’s a joy to encounter a suspenseful book whose turns lurk, rather than lumber, around the corner.”–The New York Times Book Review View the full article

Details leaked onto the front page, saturated global consciousness. The inaptly named Titan, a 22-foot deep-sea sub had gone missing. The world was enthralled. Pernicious questions arose. How could we navigate ships to Mars, but lose them in our own oceans? Most pressing, what fate did the frigid North Atlantic hold for those onboard if time ran out? An oxygen supply window of roughly 96-hours. Torquing the mystery was a spectrum of paradox. Packed inside the Titan, a white minnow with no seats and a single view-port, were mostly very rich people on a voyage to the wreckage of what was once the largest vessel in the world. The aptly named Titanic. An ‘unsinkable’ ship which because of hubris sank 111 years earlier and was now the undersea graveyard for mostly poor, third-class passengers and the ship’s working-class crew. But the most important ingredient in the engrossing tale is the medium where it all takes place. Water. Water mysteries thrill us like no other. Perhaps it’s because a body of water, an ocean, lake, river, flashfloods or even monsoon rains can so quickly separate us from the rest of humanity. Quite often with tragic permanence. But we are also captivated by stories in which individuals return from the threshold of a water death and live. Around the globe, from Buenos Aires to Bora Bora, people cried and cheered on July 10, 2018 when the last of the Wild Boars, 12 young boys and their football coach, were extracted from a flooded cave system in Chang Rai, Thailand. A seventeen-day ordeal whose finale was a successful Hail Mary rescue performed by an ad hoc group of international cave divers and Thai Navy Seals and required fully anaesthetizing the boys with Xanax, ketamine and atropine, strapping them into flexible stretchers and full-face masks and swimming them out through miles of narrow rock passageways. Lesser known but equally compelling is the case of Nigerian cook Harrison Okene. Okene was working aboard a tugboat in the Atlantic when it capsized and sank in 2013. He survived alone and in darkness lifting himself into a tiny air pocket. Terrified he listened to what he believed were the sounds of marine life feeding on the dead bodies of perished crew members nearby. On his third day trapped undersea, he saw a light glowing from the water beneath him. Reached toward it. Startled salvage divers not expecting to find anyone alive, yelled in their comms, “Corpse! Corpse! Corpse!” The divers executed an elaborate rescue that included an impromptu diving lesson for the cook and three more days of decompression in a diving bell. It was science that kept Okene alive, but despite this he was later ostracized by some in his community claiming he had used black magic to survive. He suffered terribly from skin sloughing from the water exposure and night terrors. He vowed never to go back to the sea. Eventually Okene’s fears dimmed. And he sought to honor his experience and his rescuers by training and becoming licensed as a saturation diver. Returning to work the sea that captured, held and nearly killed him. But while we’re vitalized by these stories of survival, we’re also equally and morbidly fascinated by those who don’t return from water’s final embrace. The enigma of what it is like to drown filling us with both fear and fascination. Our literature adds to this mystique even as it seeks to explain it. In Sebastian Junger’s bestselling 1997 non-fiction book The Perfect Storm, the author describes in a long-passage of chilling detail the so-called, “break point”: “When the first involuntary breath occurs most people are still conscious, which is unfortunate, because the only thing more unpleasant than running out of air is breathing in water. At this point the person goes from voluntary to involuntary apnea, and the drowning begins in earnest.” Fiction isn’t any kinder in this regard. In this passage from Stella Maris, the second of the late Cormac McCarthy’s final two books, psychiatric patient Alicia Western describes a suicidal ideation; death by drowning herself in Lake Tahoe wearing a leather belt padlocked to an anchor. “First of all the water off the east shore is about sixteen hundred feet deep and agonizingly cold…As you descend, your lungs will start to shrivel. At a thousand feet they’ll be about the size of tennis balls…Your eardrums in all likelihood are going to burst and that is really going to hurt.” McCarthy is known for the painstaking research that brings such authenticity to his work. And that fictional tragic descent brings us back now, finally, to one in true life. That of the Titan. We learn a few days into the search the sub would indeed resurface, but only in bits and pieces. Ths hull, made of seemingly indestructible carbon fiber and titanium, had indeed destructed. Imploded. No match for the more than 5500 pounds per square inch or near 380 atmospheres exerted on it at depth. Two years previous, OceanGate principal Stockton Rush told New Yorker magazine he wanted be remembered as an innovator and rule breaker. He boasted, “The carbon fiber and titanium?” referring to the submersible’s hull. “There’s a rule you don’t do that. Well I did.” And paid the ultimate price. Rush was also the Titan’s pilot. So now we also know that in the short time from the sub’s launch to loss of contact, the Titan and the remains of Rush and its four passengers became part of a debris field on the ocean floor. Heartbreakingly near its near-namesake, in an expanding testament to hubris and graveyards of the deep. One of those killed was a 19-year-old named Suleman Dawood, onboard with his father, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood. Suleman reportedly told a relative he was “terrified,” by the prospect of the undersea voyage. Presciently and rightly so. But still we wonder did they all know their fate before it came for them? New information suggests they did. Evidence that they may have tried to surface by releasing ballast. The Titan tragedy is a reminder of the absolute dominance of the ocean, or any body of water for that matter, to separate us, isolate us, kill is if it chooses, but also in its ability to inexplicably mesmerize us with the mysteries of what happens beneath it. Maybe because it’s the very essence of ourselves. At 60-percent water it’s impossible for us to ever look away. *** View the full article