The Act of Story Statement – As in the Days of Noah A woman and her family must defy and survive a menacing alien race until escape to a hidden place is possible for the last of humanity. Antagonists of As in the Days of Noah The Liberator Aliens – False Gods, True Tyrants The Liberators emerged from hiding, claiming to be humanity’s creators. They offered technology, healing, and a DNA upgrade—but it came at a cost. The nanites rewrote human DNA, enslaving those who accepted. Those who refused are hunted. The Liberators never came to help—they came to own. CURE – The Enforcers of Submission CURE (Center for Unification of Races on Earth) is the global regime enforcing alien rule. A collaboration between human leaders and the Liberators, it controls economies, law enforcement, and military forces. Their mission: eliminate the Unaltereds. Resistance means starvation, exile, or death. Their rule is absolute—unless someone dares to fight back. Mike Danforth – The Enforcer with Cracks in His Armor (Temporary Antagonist) Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner, Mike Danforth, is a ruthless enforcer of CURE’s rule. He’s spent years hunting Unaltereds, but doubts are creeping in. Sophie Thompson’s defiance forces him to question everything. He is an enemy—for now. The only question is whether he’ll betray the regime or be consumed by it. The Unidentified Antichrist – The True Mastermind in the Shadows (Future Antagonist) The Liberators rule, but a greater force waits in the shadows. A human leader—charismatic, brilliant, ruthless—will soon rise, not just enforcing alien rule but commanding it. Unlike CURE, he won’t demand submission—he will make the world want to follow him. By the time humanity realizes the truth, it will be too late. Conjuring Your Breakout Title As in the Days of Noah The Unaltereds The Wrong Apocalypse Deciding Your Genre and Approaching Comparables Genre: Apocalypse Romance Stranded by A.K. Duboff – This series explores an alien planet after a crash landing. The characters must navigate a strange world and alien technology. There is also a love story between the main characters. Falling Skies (Television Series) – Follows a small group of humans battling against aliens who have taken over Earth. This series has a similar tone to my manuscript. Left Behind (Series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins) – This series follows the book of Revelation literally through traditional human teachings. My story, however, questions if those interpretations are correct. What if there is no rapture? What if the one-world government is actually an alien invasion? What if the “mark of the beast” is a DNA upgrade serum? Core Wound and The Primary Conflict When Revelation’s prophecy unfolds differently than expected, a mother joins the resistance to escape an alien-controlled Earth, where DNA upgrades steal free will. But for Sophie, survival means more than fighting. She must overcome past betrayals and decide if trusting others is worth the risk to save her family. Primary Conflict The one-world government is controlled by an alien race that arrived on Earth claiming to be humanity’s true creators. They came with promises—peace, progress, and a DNA upgrade that would supposedly perfect the human race. But it didn’t take long for the truth to come out. The upgrade wasn’t just about health or strength—it rewrote human DNA, stripping away free will and turning people into something other than human. Those who refused were cut off completely. No food, no work, no way to survive. The world fell under their rule, and resistance became nearly impossible. Nearly. The Freedom Institute is a pebble in the shoe of the “Liberator” aliens as they seek 100% control over all humanity. Guided by strange dreams and armed with advanced science, the protagonist and the resistance start piecing together a way forward. Little by little, they realize there might actually be hope for something more. A way to fight back. A way to escape. Somewhere out there, beyond the reach of the aliens, lies the Hidden Country—a place no one can track, no one can invade. It’s real. It’s waiting. And it was prepared for those who refused to surrender their humanity—the Unaltereds. Secondary Conflicts A short love triangle, followed by the protagonist struggling to trust her feelings for her final love interest. A mother’s heartbreak over her son taking the alien upgrade, making him ineligible for the resistance’s escape plan. She is desperate to find him but is kept in the dark again and again. A love/hate relationship with Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner, Mike Danforth, a man she has known for years. Protagonist’s Inner Conflict Trust doesn’t come easy anymore. After everything she’s been through, after all the betrayals, it’s easier to rely on herself. Every new situation forces a choice—take the risk and trust, or shut people out and survive alone. She wants to believe there are still people worth trusting, but experience has taught her otherwise. With each decision, she walks the line between survival and isolation. The Incredible Importance of Setting Earth Under Alien Rule No one lives outside the cities. The Liberators forced all rural populations into urban centers—those who resisted were bombed. The cities remain, but life is controlled and restricted. Movement outside city limits is prohibited, and no one can buy or sell without the DNA upgrade. Media is controlled. There is only state TV provided by the aliens. No communication. No one knows what’s happening around the world. The internet is gone. Information is completely controlled. Key Locations The Freedom Institute – A high-tech, sterile underground base, hidden 10 stories below an abandoned hotel. Protected by palladium and glass, equipped with advanced technology. Cafeteria resembles a school cafeteria. Philadelphia Street – Where Sophie trades herself for her children. Philadelphia Police Station – Where Danforth’s loyalty starts to waver. Cabin in the country – A hidden torture chamber, where Sophie’s grit is tested and her scientific resources surprise her captors. Freedom Institute Safe House – A suburban home with a hidden basement, used to keep Sophie’s children safe from CURE’s watchful eyes. Underground Hybrid Farm – A repurposed Naval Academy, now a breeding and training ground for alien-human hybrid soldiers. Here, Sophie pushes her bodysuit to its limits, using every gadget at her disposal to gather intel. The hybrids are massive, intimidating, but flawed—dangerous, yet not the brightest. RV Trip to Pittsburgh – A tense, close-quarters setting where the romance finally solidifies. Bombed-Out Pittsburgh – A ghost city, destroyed by the invasion. Green Tortoise Building in Pittsburgh (Lobby/Basement) – The place where Sophie’s dreams finally make sense and she discovers the key to the resistance’s survival.

THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT: Do whatever it takes to save Tenora and Earth from climate extinction. THE ANTAGONIST PLOTS THE POINT Hexley, a scientific genius, was never granted the opportunity by his home planet, Tenora, to become the breakout star he has always believed he is. Realizing that Tenora would never allow him to lead the governing Council, even after bioengineering the first Water Carrier to transport Earth’s water to his drought- and disease-ravaged planet, he chose exile to Earth rather than endure ongoing humiliation and rejection. In his thirty-five years on Earth, he has amassed a trillion-dollar fortune by controlling the planet’s water purification and distribution systems; yet, he has never relinquished his obsession with avenging his exile. Now, he has developed the means to end Tenora’s water missions to Earth and will hold Earth’s water hostage until Tenora’s Council begs him to return as their true leader. Only then will he allow Tenora’s planet-saving water missions to resume. Only Hexley’s beloved adult daughter Geri, born on Earth without knowledge of Tenora, can temper his hunger for revenge. Soon, he’ll tell Geri that she’s Tenoran, even though his wife forbids it, and Geri will return to Tenora with him, understanding and supporting all he has achieved and overcome in his life. However, Geri’s need for independence and her commitment to saving climate-challenged Earth thwarts Hexley’s idealistic and unattainable dreams for their relationship, leading him to disinherit her. Geri’s estrangement emotionally complicates and exasperates Hexley’s megalomaniacal obsession with revenge. With mounting grief and despair over losing his daughter fueling his world-ending destructive powers, he will destroy Earth and Tenora if he is not stopped. THE BREAKOUT TITLE THE WATER CARRIERS – The three main characters, in addition to the bio-engineered Water Carriers, can be interpreted as water carriers. HERE, NOT HERE – The origin of Ari’s wisdom that saves the day. A TOUCH AT THE END OF THE WORLD – The origin of Ari’s transformative powers that saves the day. GENRE AND COMPARABLES Genre: Speculative and Climate Fiction, Literary Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven’s genre-bending literary science fiction meets Sequoia Nagamatsu‘s How High We Go In The Dark’s, multiple viewpoints, futuristic technology, multi-generational grief and grievance, love, and hope for the future. CORE WOUND AND THE PRIMARY CONFLICT When a precocious nineteen-year-old female scientist—raised on Earth but from climate-ravaged Tenora—survives the invasion of her family’s compound in Africa’s Nubian Desert, she is forced to return to Tenora, and in a race against time and climate change must gain the scientific acumen and prescience to stop the destruction of her planet and Earth by the richest man who’s ever lived. OTHER MATTERS OF CONFLICT PRIMARY: Ari must choose what is good for the many and prioritize the survival of Earth and Tenora over her own desires. At the outset, her mother tasks her with successfully pixilating into deep space from Earth to prepare for a return to Tenora, her planet of origin. Moments before this latest deep space attempt, her mother warns her that if she fails again, she and her parents will soon die on Earth. Ari’s primary ambition has been to remain on Earth and help save it by studying fusion at one of the world’s best schools. She also wants to learn how to be one of many experiencing the world, but her mother’s words force her to confront a greater responsibility. Ongoing challenges to choose the greater good over her personal needs are the rungs of the ladder Ari must continue to climb, as the stakes for the survival of both worlds keep rising with her. SECONDARY: Midway through the story, Ari faces the dilemma of either remaining committed to her mission of stopping Hexley and the secrecy it entails, or being honest with Rabia, her first love, whom she meets on Tenora. She fears that holding back from Rabia may lead to losing her, and ultimately, she does lose her. Months later, Rabia, who has been hiding her own truths, is murdered, plunging Ari into an even deeper conflict as she grapples with all the signs she likely missed regarding Rabia’s situation while being consumed by her own turmoil—signs that could have potentially saved Rabia. THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING Ari sits on a desert dune, sifting sand and watching an egg-eater snake. The physics of the heat waves rising against the vast desert horizon intrigues her mind and rekindles her yearning for a life with peers, tackling scientific problems not of her own making, experiencing snow, winter sports, new foods, and a vibrant life away from her family’s desert compound. Later, in her workshop in the industrial research hangar, Ari works on her pixilation suit: millions of micro-organisms acting as a refraction layer against the radiation from space. Monitors, servers, spectroscopes, chests of parts, and plasma chambers represent some of the environments she thrives in and uses to operate the water and solar energy generation systems for the family’s drought-resistant seed farm. A flashing light signifying a system failure drives Ari to the massive water and solar energy fields. Ari spots her mother walking in the distance, her flowing white linens in the foreground, their home carved into ancient stone in the background. Ari thinks the scene could be from a science-fiction movie, except she and her family really are aliens. Later, at dinner and in her bedroom, Ari learns and worries about her pixilation now scheduled for tomorrow. With her parents standing by, Ari departs from the pixilation desert plateau, undergoing mind-blowing sensations of tearing apart, color, energy, motion, sound, absolute silence, and millions of atomic replicas of herself moving near the speed of light, climaxing with her mother’s voice calling her name in the star-filled rapture of space. Geri Hexley gazes out the window of her family’s luxuriously appointed jet, featuring an Albers painting embedded in an ebony and glass cabin divider. As she travels through a sea of white storm clouds, she contemplates the storm that her news that she won’t be joining Hexley Enterprises will unleash in the Manor House below. Beneath the clouds, she sees the ten-thousand-acre estate, and suddenly, her father’s new city, Hexley City, appears as if from nowhere. Observing it from five thousand feet, she learns from the family pilot that it is home to HexLink and other mysterious enterprises, possibly related to space travel. In a silent, driverless air car gliding along the Shenandoah foothills, Geri finally reaches the guard gatehouse. She then follows the mile-long approach to the house, passing horses grazing in pastures and dense forests beyond. Ultimately, she arrives at the motor court, where a towering water-woman sculpture stands at the center. With head uplifted to the sky, her wide-spread arms drip water into the basin below. Inside the home’s pristine, shiny marble interior, Geri averts her gaze from famous art pieces that adorn the museum-like walls and atriums. In her suite of rooms, she notices a new black material has replaced her desktop, and later at the formally dressed dining table with her family, she sees the same dark material above the table, hovering like a horizontally suspended monolith. Hexley swims in his enclosed Olympic pool struggling to find a rhythm to his stroke. Thwarted by thoughts of his daughter’s arrival and the portentous announcement she will be making, he swallows water, hoists himself from the pool, and naked retreats to the sauna and shower rooms. In his steaming hot shower, he imagines his life on Tenora as a boy in that dark apartment with his father’s large presence filling the small space and the dirty pan of water in the corner for washing, used by all his family, always his turn coming last. He imagines his father standing in front of him in the shower, and he is choking him, but this time the man won’t die. These settings are all within the first thirty pages of the novel. Ari’s additional locations include Tenora’s completely enclosed capital city, Trosi, along with its several beige, sandstone dominant plazas, water and climbing simulations, a minimalist flat each room with its air cleaning arboretum built into the walls, the last aquifer, a hospital room, and a Scout training and research center. Then there’s Patagonia, featuring its mountains, forests, a small village’s dirt street, and a single, dangling-from-the-ceiling light bulb hotel room. Finally, there are various interiors of New York City, plus the Statue of Liberty, and the Oculus. Geri’s additional locations encompass her townhome and Ana’s brownstone in Cambridge, MA, as well as the post-Civil War streets of Khartoum, Khartoum’s Corinthia Hotel, the war-ravaged park along the Nile, the interior and exterior of Al-Nilin Mosque, Omdurman market, the refinery site in Northern Khartoum, Geri’s spartan living quarters there, and the interiors of her advanced technology production site. Lastly, when Geri travels to New York, she will visit a Long Island nouveau-riche south shore home and various interior and exterior sites in NYC. Hexley’s locations include his oversized bedroom and his study, which features floor-to-vaulted-ceiling bookcases filled with first editions; the corridors, suspended glass walkways, pixilation chambers and cages of Hexley’s underground research center, the Dandelion; the forests of Hexley’s estate, which include a new building site in progress with crops, solar power, and cattle, as well as a mid-completion full site enclosure; the interiors of HexLink with the Water Ships; and the immense production and assembly site in Hexley City, as viewed from Hexley’s private viewing room, The Aerie.

On January 22nd, 2025 journalist/essayist/ screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper died suddenly at the age of 66. He was a friend as well as a fellow Baltimore-dwelling expat who hailed from Harlem. I ran into him often on the street, and we would stop to chat, sometimes for a couple of hours. Neither of us knew how to drive and Barry once joked that our constant strolling through the city was the reason we kept running into one another. “We’re New Yorkers, we’re used to walking,” he said. As a fan of Barry’s work in the 1980s, his streetwise record reviews and essays published in The Village Voice and Spin were my introduction to his writing. He was one of the first “hip-hop scribes,” slaying with textual style that swaggered like a B-boy in prep school and was as inspired by the broken glass everywhere sidewalks as by the non-fiction prose of Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin and Truman Capote, especially In Cold Blood. Barry described the latter writer as, “My hero.” Those stories, especially his longread classics on the early years of crack in Harlem, wild drug cowboy Larry Davis, and christening producer Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing musical era, served as inspiration for the next generation of post-New Journalism writers that included Da Ghetto Communicator, Karen Good, Sacha Jenkins and myself. However, beginning in 1990, it was Barry’s scripts for the hood classics New Jack City (1991), Above the Rim and Sugar Hill (both released in 1994) that people watched repeatedly and quoted flawlessly. We can see the inspiration of New Jack City in the personas (and hear it in the music) of Puffy, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, all dudes who went from the streets to suites with the swiftness of the film’s celebrated crack kingpin Nino Brown. Fellow writer Nelson George, who Cooper helped years ago to get in at the Village Voice, first put me in contact with Barry in 1998 when I was helping the Larry Flynt-owned Black style magazine Code to scout for soulful contributors. When Barry told me he lived in Baltimore, the same city where my mom relocated in 1978, I knew it was time to visit. Thirteen years after his last produced feature, I conducted an interview with Barry for the hip-hop issue of Stop Smiling magazine. Barry shared many stories over coffee at Xanzo Café on Charles Street. The tales ranged from schooling himself at the Schomburg Library, where he read Richard Wright and Countee Cullen, to smoking dust with his crew after watching a basketball game at the Rucker to meeting with homeboys outside Esplanade Gardens, the co-op building where he grew up from the age of 10, to discuss the latest films they’d seen. “We met at the base of the Martin Luther King statue and that would be like our Algonquin Round table where we talked,” he recalled. “We would sit on the bench at 13, 14, 15 years old and be critically breaking down movies like Roger Ebert. The hustlers, the dope kids, the scramblers and the nerds all went there to discuss movies. Even the dope dealers were intellectuals.” Located on 147th Street and 8th Avenue, Esplanade was two blocks away from the Roosevelt Theater. Once a jewel of the community, by the late 1960s it had become a grindhouse best known for showing horror, Blaxploitation and kung-fu flicks. According to Barry, that massive movie house also had a reputation for rodents. “We called it the Rat Palace,” he laughed. It was at the Roosevelt where he saw Shaft, Superfly (“I went to see that six times”) and Across 110th Street, which opened on December 19th, 1972. Fifty-three years later I could imagine Barry sitting in the center of the theater, leaning forward slightly and lost in the graphically vicious drama projected on screen. The film was adapted from the 1970 novel Across 110th (Street was added to the movie title), by Wally Ferris, which was written as a fluke by a career camera man whose main gig was working for a local news channel. In the counterculture newspaper The Staff, sometimes crime writer Harlan Ellison praised the book. “I read Wally Ferris’s novel, Across 110th,” he wrote. “It was a tough and uncompromising naturalistic novel of underworld life in Harlem, not as good as Chester Himes’s Coffin Ed Johnson-Grave Digger Jones books, but a direct lineal descendant of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson in terms of honesty and dealing with the pragmatic realities of omnipresent violence. It was an upfront piece of street fiction, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.” Decades later, writer/editor Andrew Nette gave the book and author a much-needed spotlight in Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 (2019). “The fact that Across 110th is such an interesting book and a vivid depiction of New York at the time it was written is in no small part due to its author, Wally Ferris,” Nette wrote in his excellent essay “City on the Brink: Wally Ferris’s Across 110th.” “Ferris was a union cameraman and stage manager for WNEW-TV in New York for almost forty years. He worked on the 10 o’clock News and most of their other regular programming. He was also a lifelong New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn by parents descended from immigrants who had left Ireland during the Great Famine. He grew up during the Depression, brought up by his mother after his father, a policeman, had died at an early age.” While today I too am a fan of Ferris’s brutal book, it was the film that I was aware of first, having seen it opening weekend at the Loew’s Victoria on 125th Street. The day before its release there was a gala premiere at the theater that included stars Anthony Quinn and Yaphet Kotto. Outside the theater they were greeted by a cheering crowd of more than 200 surprised to see that type of event in Harlem. Preparing the audience of more than 2,000 for the mucho spilled blood they were about to see on screen, Quinn, according to the New York Times, explained, “The excessive violence of the film is intentional, because desperation creates violence, and until we end desperation of my people and your people, we can’t end violence.” Quinn’s crazed character Captain Mattelli (Sullivan in the book) brings a lot of violence and anger to every scene’s he’s in; a dirty cop who has no problem smashing Black suspects in the face while calling them the N word, Mattelli was a cop driven crazy by the streets he was supposed to be protecting and Quinn played dude with intensity. The year before I’d seen The French Connection at the same theater and Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), was Officer Friendly compared to Mattelli. Of course, it didn’t help his disposition when he was partnered with big, black Lieutenant William Pope, who towers over him in both height and intellect. Played with equal bravado by Yaphet Kotto, his character was a recent college grad that represented “a new kind of policeman.” But, as Mattelli tried to teach him, the job would soon change him. In one scene he offered Pope a shot of whisky. “I don’t drink,” Pope replied. Mattelli chuckled. “You will.” While Ferris gave the characters more depth than their screen versions, especially Mattelli (who experienced a double whammy tragedy that explained his asshole-ness), director Barry Shear and screenwriter Luther Davis were faithful to the novel. Shear was primarily known as a television director, but his bugged-out debut feature Wild in the Streets (1969) is another favorite. Though Across 110th Street has been labeled Blaxploitation, it has also been embraced by the neo-noir crews and the followers of Quentin Tarantino, who snatched the dope Bobby Womack theme song for his third feature Jackie Brown. Across a 110th Street opened with a 1968 black Cadillac cruising up the West Side Highway to the 110th Street exit, where it turned off. The Caddie made its way to 7th Avenue, turned right on 125th Street and kept moving until reaching the destination. The entire time the ride was in motion, the theme song blared loud and proud in true Blaxploitation style. Following the aural blueprint laid down by Shaft the year before, the song was soulfully funky. “Isaac Hayes (Shaft) and Curtis Mayfield (Superfly) had done their things, and I told United Artists they could make me just as big, and they already had a film company too,” Womack told Phonograph Record in 1974. “So they got me the score for this film. Actually (composer/ trombonist) J.J. Johnson was already involved, but it was a chance at least to write some songs even if I wasn’t running the show.” Womack told Steven Rosen of Music World in 1973, “I went back to LA and watched the picture and met the cast, got with J.J. (Johnson co-wrote the theme and scored the instrumental tracks) who gave me a lot of pointers on timing and there it was.” Two weeks later the music was turned in. Womack’s only criticism, however, was about the way in which the film coordinators handled the music after it was completed. “Like they had a guy’s head being put under the (iron) presses and they were playing something like ‘I Don’t Care How You Do It.’ I wouldn’t have no funky music like that when they were killing a guy.” When the men got out of the ride in front of a shabby tenement, the audience recognized them as pale faced interlopers on a mission. They were Italian mob men coming uptown to collect $300,000 from the illegal numbers banks operated by Doc Johnson (Richard Ward). Inside the apartment, the black and white gangsters were doing their money counting and exchange when there was a knock. Looking through the peephole, the door dude saw two black cops, but they were really just disguised as cops with a plan to rip off all the loot. The leader was Jim Harris, played by underrated actor Paul Benjamin. A building superintendent who grew-up hard, Harris had been to prison and was looking to finance his future with other folk’s funds. His partner in crime included fellow heist man Joe Logart (Ed Bernard), who froze when the bullets started flying and bodies began dropping. In the book, Harris and Logart served in Vietnam together, but that connection was never mentioned in the movie. Both men were serious guys, but the same couldn’t be said for goofy getaway driver Henry J. Jackson. Portrayed with flare by Antonio Fargas, whose over-the-top flamboyance served as grim comic relief, he’s the weakest link. In the book Jackson called it “the biggest bang-bang heist that happened around here in twenty years.” Though they made it out alive after Harris fatally machine gunned all the hoods and two cops, the next 24 hours proved to be the longest of their lives. While the marauding trio was splitting the cash, the cops, mafia, and Doc Johnson began searching for them. You or I would’ve been on the first train, plane, or automobile out of the hood, but these guys stayed within the confines of Harlem as though they were bulletproof. They weren’t. It might’ve been cool if Jackson hadn’t decided to dress like a pimp in multicolored threads with a matching hat and take his cold cash (he kept his money in the freezer) to bar/whore house the 7-11 Club. That club reminded me of the spots and after-hours joints I’d heard about from DJ Hollywood, outlaw places where vice was nice and anything could happen. It was at 7-11 where mad Mafia Man (a crazed Anthony Franciosa as Nick D’Salvio) found Jackson sucking on a whore’s toes and smashed a glass in his face. I was so used to viewing Franciosa as the cool reporter Jeff Dillion on television drama The Name of the Game, it was wild seeing him as a bloodthirsty son-in-law of the syndicate Don who relished thinking of new ways to torture and kill. That sadistic scene was one that stayed with me for years. Writer Christopher Chambers, author of the forthcoming Street Whys (Three Room Press), says, “A lot of Blaxploitation films were cartoony even when they had better production values. This one is not. Across 110th Street was about as gritty as you can get in the genre and frankly if Barry Shear had continued to direct features he would have been the Peckinpah of urban crime.” Chambers first saw it at the Carlin Drive-In in Baltimore when he was a kid, but has revisited it several times since. “I think its aged well,” he says. “As you see the cycles of 1970s decay in New York City, anticipate the ferment and gentrification, and indeed the relapses. People are dope fiends, thieves and hoodlums, murderers, gangster molls and femme fatales, johns and tricks, dirty cops, racist cops, uncaring politicians for a reason – those reasons don’t change.” Across a 110th Street opened eight months after Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia masterpiece The Godfather, but showed different kind of made men. “I do love how this was the anti-Godfather,” Chambers added, “wherein Italian criminals aren’t dapper dons and white-collar legit businessman, but rather nasty violent thugs, which was reality.” Certainly, much of D’Salvio’s anger erupted when Black, gravelly voice boss Doc Johnson, who he tried to punk, told him straight, “You ain’t never gonna make it. You know that? What are you, 40, 45 years old? You were a punk errand boy when you married the boss’s daughter and you’re still a punk errand boy.” Out of all the characters Doc Johnson was my favorite. An old-school numbers guy who rose from nothing, he reminded me of a few self-made men I knew (or heard about) back in those days: from business men to barbers, in-the-life pimps to Sonny behind the bar at the Shalimar, most of them cats made something from nothing. Though it’s been said that Doc was based on legendary gangster Bumpy Johnson, who just the year before was played by Moses Gunn in Shaft, actor Richard Ward brought a natural gruffness to the character that was also laced with humor. After the death of Jackson, who was castrated, the cat-and-mouse chase became even more intense and deadly; so much happened that it was hard to believe it was all within a 24-hour period. Not wanting the spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen Across a 110th Street, but the final images of the black mobsters on the rooftop had me questioning the philosophical definition of good guys and bad guys for years. As a champion of underrated writers, as well as authors who only published one novel, I was happy that Nette’s essay introduced me to the writing of Wally Ferris. Though Ferris worked on several books after the success of his debut, no others were published. “My father wrote almost every day and was working on a project up until the last days of his life,” Ferris’ daughter Elisabeth told Nette. “There are a few completed manuscripts.” One completed project was a thriller called The Extradition, which his friend Wallace Stroby, a crime writer from New Jersey, had read. Stroby told Nette: “The Extradition was about a New York prosecutor and a tough cop who go to Brazil to extradite a Bernie Madoff-like character. By its nature it was a little dated. Not sure what the history of it was, but Ferris hadn’t had an agent since the early seventies, so I doubt it got around much. I think for Wally, the book and the movie were a fluke. He had a good-paying union job at WNEW and was raising a family, and I don’t think he wanted to upset all that to chase down some vague literary goal. At least that’s what I’m guessing.” Wally Ferris died in July 2014. Unfortunately, Across 110th has been out-of-print for decades and currently sells for over a hundred dollars online. There is supposed to be a Scottish reprint this year featuring an introduction written by Stuart Cosgrove. As a connoisseur of uptown crime narratives, I can see the influence of Across a 110th Street in Barry Michael Cooper’s cinematic joints, the Fat Jack/Harlem World narrative of “The Hip-Hop Shangri-La,” the Bumpy Johnson series Godfather of Harlem, and my 2023 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine short story “The Life and Times of Big Poppa,” a tribute to the uptown numbers game and, as the protagonist often said, “Back when Harlem was Harlem.” Four days before Barry Michael Cooper died, he and I exchanged emails. I had interviewed him for a CrimeReads piece on NYC gang movies (The Cool World was a favorite), and he was responding. I don’t think we ever had a conversation or correspondence where Harlem wasn’t spoken about or touched on. During our last chat he brought up artist Romare Bearden, but we could’ve easily talked about gangster (and former Apollo owner) Guy Fisher, Daddy Was A Numbers Runner author Louise Merriwether, journalist Les Matthews (Mister 1-2-5), our buddy Nelson George (their daddy’s hung out at the same 7th Avenue bar) Claudine actress Diahann Carroll, rapper Spoonie Gee, or the countless other wonderful people and stories that have emerged from the golden streets of Harlem. For more on the work of Barry Michael Cooper click here and here. View the full article

Do love and danger go together? They sure do in my world! A romantic plot, even a small one, adds depth and layers to any story, and suspense is no exception. In fact I’d argue it gives the reader space to breathe and more to care about when someone the protagonist loves is in danger. Here’s a list of ten of the best romantic thrillers I’ve read in the past year. Mind Games by Nora Roberts The name Nora Roberts says it all. I loved everything about this book from the second chance romance to the unusual profession of the heroine (video game creator) as well as the very unusual suspense with Thea’s connection with the man who killed her parents. A perfect blend of romance and suspense. Fireline by Kate Angelo There’s something about a fireman. . . and especially a smokejumper. The high stakes suspense had me flipping pages and I loved the building romantic tension. Kate Angelo is a newer author for me, and I’ve loved everything by her that I’ve read. In the Barren Ground by Loreth Ann White I’m a sucker for a wilderness setting like this one in the Barrens near the Arctic Circle. I loved Tana’s spunk and determination to do her job even five months pregnant. The building suspense and the budding romance with bad boy Crash, a bush pilot, made for an irresistible read. Edge of Collapse by Kyla Stone Wait, this is an apocalyptic novel so how is it a a thriller with suspense? In all the best ways! It starts off with Hannah at the mercy of a serial killer. She’s been caged and abused by the madman for five years and is pregnant when an EMP attack takes out the grid in Michigan. The cat-and-mouse game she has to play with her abuser and the romance that develops between her and Liam, a reclusive soldier, will take the entire series to play out, but you’ll savor every word. Vanishing Girls by Lisa Regan I love a strong heroine, and detective Josie Quinn’s determination and drive hooked me immediately. The slow burn romance with Luke was the perfect balance as the ticking time bomb of finding a missing girl before it’s too late. The story scrolled out with perfect pacing. All the Little Raindrops by Mia Sheridan I loved this perfect blend of thriller and romance. Its heart-pounding tension and deeply emotional love story blend a delicious concoction swoon-worthy moments and edge-of-your-seat suspense. The Spy Coast by Tess Gerritsen The Spy Coast is a fresh and thrilling take on the classic spy novel, blending espionage, small-town charm, and pulse-pounding suspense. I, ahem, am of a certain age where I appreciated more mature characters and the romance was a plus. Version 1.0.0 The Garden Girls by Jessica Patch I loved this novel. It is a hold-your-breath-and-pray novel full of suspense and unexpected twists. The remote location (an island in the Outer Banks) added to the tension as Bexley, aided by the last man she would have asked for help, searches for her sister who was taken by a serial killer. The secret baby trope added to the interesting layers for me. Cold Dead Night by Lisa Phillips An unstoppable serial killer who traumatized former FBI agent Kenna is determined to land her in jail for his crimes. The nail-biting tension doesn’t let up, and this is a terrific thriller with a small romantic plot I suspect will be further developed in the next book. I like those kinds of series where there’s an overarching thread of romance that plays out. It keeps the thriller elements high. Beautiful Storm by Barbara Freethy When her father’s plane mysteriously disappeared in the middle of an electrical storm, Alicia Monroe became obsessed with lightning. Obsessed by storms, Alicia covers local stories by day and chases storms at night. One night during a violent thunderstorm she sees what appears to be a murder during a flash of lightning and her investigation puts her in extreme danger. The storm aspect of this novel was particularly compelling to me (my brother died from a lightning strike) and I read it all in one sitting. *** View the full article

In Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh—a 2017 dystopian novel that won a major award in her country—“mass hysteria” ensues when a deadly virus seems to leap from animals to humans. In its broad strokes, the story presaged the spread of Covid in 2020. Her latest, a character-driven horror novel, envisions a different sort of catastrophe, one brought about by capitalism’s excesses. Beautifully translated by Sarah Moses, The Unworthy takes place at a once-legit monastery that’s become a misogynist nightmare. The women living there arrive willingly—they’ve fled from environmental disasters and widespread lawlessness—but once inside, they’re tortured, isolated, brainwashed, and forbidden from speaking or reading. Bazterrica’s unnamed narrator risks death to share her story, sometimes using her blood as ink, and hiding her manuscript under the floorboards in her cell. Despite the unrelenting cruelty, the protagonist claims moments of freedom, finding reasons to be hopeful. From her home in Buenos Aires, Bazterrica discussed the pernicious influence of political lies, art’s power to shape behavior, and the enthusiastic audiences she’s found in academia and high schools. Tender is the Flesh was published in English in 2020. There’s a big question in the story: Is the virus real or an excuse for the government kill off its enemies? Yes, you have that ambivalence, and readers have to decide if the virus is real or not. In that book and your new one, your characters are living in worlds where big lies are repeated, gaining immense power. Is this a theme you set out to tackle, or is it one that developed as you come to know your characters? When I have an idea, I need to find the elements before writing, the elements of how I’m going to tell the story. That can take months or years. It’s the most difficult thing. There’s a phrase attributed to Flaubert, the author of Madame Bovary: “With my burned hand, I write about the nature of fire.” I write with my burned body about capitalism, about patriarchy. Although I’m a person with a lot of resources and privilege, I’m not indifferent to what is happening in the world. As we are speaking now, women are being raped and killed. So I’m always trying to understand why we live in such a violent world. Does dystopian fiction enable you to do that in ways that other kinds of fiction might not? It’s not that I’m an expert on dystopias or horror fiction. I don’t believe in genres in the sense that I think everything is literature. I read a lot of poetry, a lot of essays. After Tender is the Flesh won a big prize here in Argentina, I was asked in an interview: What genre is your novel? I thought, OK, it’s a dystopia. But when I was writing I wasn’t thinking: I want to write a dystopia. I wanted to write this story. I like to think about things that are latent now and take them to the extreme. Today with climate change we are seeing the consequences, but in The Unworthy I take those consequences to the extreme. The narrator of The Unworthy almost invites us to think that she’s violent or sadistic. She explains how she sews cockroaches into another woman’s pillow, hoping they’ll crawl into her ears and eat her brain. Do you make a concerted effort to balance the good and the bad in your protagonists? I’m not interested in fiction where the characters are without nuances, because I don’t think that is real at all. When I start writing, I’m living with the characters. When I’m washing the dishes, maybe I can see what is happening with my character in a scene I haven’t written yet. I watch them, and I have to write what they’re doing. They are alive in my mind, and if they are alive, they have to have nuances. One of the inspirations for this book was my own life. I went to a Catholic school here. The nuns told us that we have to love each other as Jesus said. And then the reality was really different. We were really mean to each other, the opposite of what Jesus said. As the book goes on, your narrator finds reasons for joy. Is this a hopeful book despite all of the horrible things that happen? I do think that it’s a book about love. But the word “love” is never written. Of course, I don’t believe in religions—if you read the book, you can take that conclusion. But I do believe that there is—you can call it God, Goddess, whatever you want to call it—an energy that creates everything. So what I try to work toward in the book is this: Where is God, really? The God that they pray to? Or is God in the links she has with Lucía and Circe (a human character and a cat)? I think that when you have relationships of love and empathy with others, you are connecting with God. In your books, humans have completely destroyed nature. Can art shape behavior in a way that could, say, begin to repair the environment? Yes, I do think that it can shape behavior, because when you read and when you are connected to art, you have the possibility of dialogue with people that worked and lived 200 years ago, or people that are living other realities. Your own reality expands, and you start looking at it in a different way. I know people who were saved by literature, people without resources, without formal education—literature did that, it saved them. Art and literature are really powerful. That is why in dictatorships—here in Argentina, we had a dictatorship—they prohibit books because they’re really powerful. Academic studies have been written about your work—the way it critiques capitalism, meat production, sexism. Have you read any of these? No, but I had some interviews with people who are writing doctorate works. A few weeks ago, a student from the United States interviewed me. And also here in Argentina, I am teaching Tender is the Flesh in schools. I’ve talked to 100 schools, from 2018 till last year. Wow, that’s great. These are groups of teenagers? Yeah, 16, more or less. In my Instagram, sometimes I post my visits to school. The students film book trailers as the characters of the novel, they write poems, they write songs. It’s incredible. View the full article

1. Write your story statement. The biracial daughter of a missing Chinese goddess must save herself and her loved ones from gods and demons who covet her newfound power. 2. In 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them. King Yán presides over the Fifth Court among the Ten Courts of Hell where souls are judged based on their deeds in life. Yet once he was known as Yama, the god of death and ruler of the Netherworld. Even after thousands of years, his ruthless pride and ambition would not allow him to accept his position. The fact that his name is used as a title for all Ten Kings of Hell seems less like a mark of respect and more like blatant mockery. For millennia he bide his time, building support, nudging the bureaucratic Netherworld toward insurrection. Still, he never dared to openly revolt against the current rulers. That is until he realized an opportunity to gain control of the Lotus Lamp—a legendary artifact imbued with cosmic forces that govern life, justice, and moral order. With it, he would have the power to regain control of all that’s rightfully his. The story begins when he captures the owner of the Lotus Lamp when she is weakened by childbirth. However, the Lotus Lamp disappears. Fourteen years later, the child accidentally activates the Luminescent Pearl which had stored the celestial light of creation radiating from the Lamp’s eternal flame, thus informing various gods and demons of her location. 3. Create a breakout title (list several options, not more than three, and revisit to edit as needed). Leora and the Luminescent Pearl Leora: Heir of the Lost (Celestial) Flame Daughter of the Lotus Lamp 4. Develop two smart comparables for your novel. Who compares to you? And why? This 75k-word YA fantasy is a modern-day continuation of the Magic Lotus Lantern. Think American Born Chinese version of Percy Jackson. It would sit nicely on a shelf with Emily XR Pan's An Arrow to the Moon and Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow. 5. Write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound. A biracial outcast in a small town discovers she’s the daughter of a missing Chinese goddess, and must save the three realms from gods and demons who covet her newfound power. 6. Sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction. As much as the insular town treats her differently because she looks Asian, Leora knows nothing about Chinese culture or mythology. When her mother’s handmaiden reveals that she’s the daughter of a Chinese goddess, she feels like an idiot for not knowing what seems to be the most basic of things. Being biracial means she’s never what people expect her to be. Even though she’s the only one able to activate the coveted celestial power stored within the Luminescent Pearl, her use of it has unintended consequences. She heals her best friend of his cerebral palsy, but then their relationship changes. The activation of the Pearl led to her dad being brutally attacked by a monster. But when she heals her dad, he dies anyway (is seized by King Yán’s faction in the Netherworld). As she blames herself for her dad’s death, an epic magic fight breaks out that results in the stabbing of her best friend who saves her. In order to get the Pearl back to save her friend, she heals the monster’s wife of her long-term illness, only to find that she had used up all the powers stored in the Pearl. Even when the Lotus Lamp reveals itself to her, instead of saving her friend like she wanted to, he sacrifices himself so that she can covertly enter the Netherworld to rescue her parents. Her guilt is her constant companion even as she denies other’s definition of who she is. Guilt for not knowing better. Guilt for making the wrong decisions. And guilt for causing the (hopefully temporary) death of her best friend, and the loss of all his memories, including their kiss. Guilt for chaining his soul to hers in the Netherworld with a cursed item made from his life force so that she wouldn’t lose him. But if she keeps going, if she believes in herself, she can fix everything and save the world. Failure is not an option. Must not be an option. Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. Will this involve family? Friends? Associates? What is the nature of it? Her mother’s snarky handmaiden: has high expectations of her that she can’t meet Her uncle’s celestial beast—the Howling Sky Dog: Is he trying to protect her as he claims, or are the rumors true that her uncle’s the one that kidnaped her mom? Because of his strength and good looks when transformed into a boy, he’s a source of jealousy for Leora’s best friend. Her dad: kept everything hidden from her and was strict about her not having any contact with the outside world. Now that she finally understands his overprotective reactions, he’s gone. The true motivation behind his actions, however, will change her view of him in the end. Her best friend: the only person she can be herself with her whole life. His changes as a result of her healing him temporarily pulled them apart, but it gave him the courage to finally confess his feelings for her. Instead of being happy together, he dies for her goals and loses all memories. She must succeed not only to save the world, but also to undo the harm to the person she loves. Her unknown mother: She’s always wondered about her mother: who she is, where she is, if she’s alive. But she’s expected to care more about rescuing her, and she finds it hard since she’s never known what a mother is supposed to be. The sentient Lotus Lamp: The Lamp is driven by unwavering righteousness and prioritizes selfless love which amplifies its powers. However, such driving forces may not be what’s best for its wielder. 7. Sketch out your setting in detail. What makes it interesting enough, scene by scene, to allow for uniqueness and cinema in your narrative and story? Sub-setting: Mount Huà of the West, one of the Five Great Mountains of China. (In prehistoric times, people worshiped mountains, and believed that the Five Great Mountains directly linked heaven and earth, that they had powers over the weather and the vitality of all life. As time went on, the Five Great Mountains became an important part of Daoism. Many scholars, celebrities, and artists went to these mountains to meditate, write poetry, and paint. The resultant prevalence of the Five Great Mountains in art and literature further elevated their significance.) As the tallest of the Five Great Mountains, Mount Huà is known for its perilous peaks. Its sheer cliffs are home to the world’s most dangerous trail. Many perish each year attempting the path of hand-hewn stone and nail-fastened planks that are at times barely wide enough for a foothold. The palace of the Third Holy Princess, the owner of the Lotus Lamp, is located on Mount Huà. However, it’s hidden from mortals and exists in the celestial realm. Leora’s dad accidentally entered this realm. Since her capture, the palace has lost the source of its power and can no longer bless the surrounding land or grant the wishes of worshipers. Her celestial handmaidens await her return. Setting: small insular town An abandoned lumber town where Leora is the token non-white resident. It has a school (k-12) with a football field, the main source of entertainment for the town. It has a graveyard that lies between the school and Leora’s manufactured home. The tallest building is the hospital, only a block away from the school. There’s one fancy Italian restaurant and fast food joints where her dad works to keep a low profile. Leora is well acquainted with the bullies at school: the popular rich girls with football players in tow. She and her best friend who’s teased for his movement and speech disabilities do their best to find humor in their prejudice. There are forests and lakes in the surrounding area. The town sits on the confluence of forgotten ley lines, shielded from the celestial realm and the Netherworld. That’s why there’s a jiāo (a proto Chinese dragon) hiding out in the lake. He’s cultivating himself through the leakage of energy from the ley lines, as well as snacking on supposed runaways. He kept himself hidden, making the lake into a wishing spot for local kids who toss coins into the shoreline. When he felt Leora activate the Luminescent Pearl, he abandons all caution for the celestial energy is so strong that he could complete his cultivation and rise to divine status in one go if he absorbs the Pearl. Sub-setting: Èrláng Shén’s palace in the celestial realm Èrláng Shén is the Third Holy Princess’s elder brother, nephew of the Jade Emperor who rules over the Celestial Realm. He’s known for his third eye which sees what was and what might be. They have a complicated family relationship. 1,300 years ago, it was he who took the Third Holy Princess from her mortal husband and son, and crushed her under Mount Huá (original legend of the Lotus Lantern). Back then, her son battled him to free his mother with the help of the Lotus Lamp and obtained Èrláng Shén’s Celestial Axe. He then used the Axe to chop open the mountain and freed his mother. Èrláng Shén’s celestial mount and best friend is 哮天犬 Xiào Tiān Quǎn—the Howling Sky Dog. Sky aims to complete the tasks entrusted to him by his master, which for the last 14 years has been to find Leora and bring her home to their palace where she can be protected. Èrláng Shén’s position in the celestial court is interesting. He is so strong that he’s free to not obey orders from anyone. Yet at the same time, he’s somewhat duty-bound due to family reasons, and is often tasked to deal with problems that no one else can/is willing to deal with. Main setting: the Netherworld Beaurocratic world of the dead primed for insurrection. A place where old traditions are tempered by modern technologies. Black and White Impermanance guides the souls of the dead down the New Yellow Fountain Road (floating conveyor belts, much more convenient than the original Yellow Fountain Road). The dead meet Old Lady Mèng Pó at the Bridge of Hesitation. Their past, present, and future lives are written on the ancient Three Lives Rock. Before they can cross the bridge, the ghosts must drink Mèng Pó soup which erases all memories of the past life. If they choose not to drink the soup, they will be trapped in the river. After the bridge, the ghosts arrive at the Ghost Gate, which has also been modernized to incorporate face-scanning technology. The Keeper of the Ghost Gate reports directly to the Eastern Ghost Emperors Cài Yùlěi and Shén Tú, who are the heads of the Five Ghost Emperors who work directly under Emperor Fēngdū, the administrator of the Netherworld. After passing through the Ghost Gate, the ghosts are then judged by the Ten Courts of Hell, headed by the Ten Kings of Hell. Each court is responsible for judging specific sins. Sinners are punished in the Eighteen Levels of hell, each with appropriate but horrendous punishments for specific types of sin. Ghosts are then assigned their reincarnation based on their deeds in the previous life. Those awaiting their turn live in Fēngdū, the kingdom of ghosts. The Ten Courts of Hell can be seen in the city of Fēngdū as spires made of black jade that pierce the starless sky.

Here’s the set-up for my new novel, No. 10 Doyers Street: in the aftermath of a bloody shootout at a Chinese theater, Archana (Archie) Morley, a woman journalist from India, investigates the gang boss, Mock Duck. Barely out his twenties, Mock is already a legend who strikes fear in New Yorkers’ hearts: “Street urchins sang ditties in his honor. They said that he could hear a pin drop, see around corners, and that his rhinoceros-thick skin protected him from injury.” Whenever there’s trouble in Chinatown, the cops come looking for him. Dressed in trousers, jacket and a hat, Archie keeps her head down and guard up as she follows her lead. She’s able to navigate New York City’s streets without attracting much attention because in the 1900s, the port city of two million people was a diverse place, attracting newcomers from all over the world—including Asia. In certain parts of town, no one gives Archie a second look. No. 10 Doyers Street is inspired by real events that took place in New York City in 1907. The title refers to the real Mock Duck’s address, and even today, readers can trace Archie’s footsteps as she makes her way from the New York Observer on “Newspaper Row” to the gangster’s Chinatown home. The geography of the city, its streets, neighborhoods, and open spaces, are crucial to the plot. Then, as now, in New York City, real estate is everything. Newspaper Row is what Park Row (by the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge) used to be called. Right across the street from City Hall, it was where many of the city’s newspapers had their headquarters, and was the perfect spot from which to keep tabs on the city’s political goings-on and socialize with sources. City Hall, a marble-clad building with French windows and an imposing cupola, was built in 1812 and is the oldest city hall in America still in use for its original purpose. At the time it was built, New York City consisted only of the island of Manhattan. As she passes by, Archie observes that the building seems modest in comparison to the ambitions of the growing, modern city: In 1898, New York consolidated into the city we know today—a city of five boroughs (Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island). The leaders of the new metropolis were trying to figure out what kind of place the city should be and how it would take its place on the world’s stage. They recognized the need for improved infrastructure, a reliable water supply, more schools, libraries and parks. They also felt the need to “clean up” immigrant neighborhoods which were believed by some (erroneously) to threaten the city’s safety. And that’s what happens in No. 10 Doyers Street. Shortly after the Chinatown shooting, Mayor George B. McClellan, a Princeton educated, forward-looking leader, holds a press conference on the front steps of City Hall and announces that the solution to the “Chinatown problem” is to raze the entire neighborhood and replace it with a park. Public opinion supports his proposal. Enroute to Doyers, Archie stops at Foley Square on Centre Street, right outside the New York County Courthouse. It’s a bustling place where “[o]yster sellers, roasted peanut vendors, and tea and coffee purveyors conducted a brisk business.” It’s also where one of New York City’s most colorful characters, George Washington Plunkitt, the “Tammany Hall bard,” delivers lessons on what he calls “practical politics.” In one of his lectures, Plunkitt describes the difference between honest and dishonest graft. He tells his listeners: “Say the Democracy’s in power… [and] I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park, or a school or such, at a new location. So what do I do? I see my opportunity and I grab it… I go to that place and buy up all the land I can. Then The Board of This or The Board of That makes its plan public, and there’s a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particularly for before. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. That’s honest graft.’” As she veers east, Archie passes the southern end of Mulberry Bend Park (now known as Columbus Park in Chinatown), which was created in the 1890s by razing tenements in the Five Points neighborhood. Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants settled here when they first arrived in New York. Although the Five Points quickly developed a reputation for poverty and crime, it was also where immigrants raised their families and worked hard to build new lives. Mayor McClellan feels he can do to Chinatown what his predecessors did to the Mulberry Bend section of Five Points. Mulberry Bend Park was supposed to improve the locals’ living conditions, but it also exemplified the difference between recreational spaces for the rich and poor. Unlike the undulating, romantic landscape of Central Park, here “sturdy benches, a flat expanse of lawn, and trees in metal cages placed along the perimeter delivered a clear message: stick to the assigned paths, and no funny business. The unobstructed lines of sight made it easy for coppers to keep watch [on the locals] and discouraged the possibility of mischief.” Archie continues up along the Bowery, where on two parallel tracks, elevated trains thunder over flophouses and brothels. She approaches Chatham Square, adjacent to Chinatown’s three main streets: Pell, Mott, and Doyers. Chinatown bustles with activity when Archie arrives: “Men in quilted vests transported loads on handcarts or from tumplines looped across their foreheads. Nuts and seeds in all colors and sizes overflowed from sacks outside a grocery store. I could have been in Canton…I could have been in Calcutta, but I couldn’t afford to become complacent.” On Pell Street, she spots the restaurant where one of Mock Duck’s enemies plunged to his death as a fire engulfed the upper floors of the building. She stops in at the Pelham Café where the proprietor, “a Russian Jew, hired singing waiters to entertain his motley clientele, who ranged from eccentric bohemians to the Astors and the Vanderbilts.” One of the singing waiters who serves Archie would later become famous under the name Irving Berlin. In the course of her investigations, Archie interviews Mock Duck’s rival, Tom Lee, the leader of the On Leong Tong at his tobacco store on Mott Street. An elegant, elderly man also known as the “mayor of Chinatown,” Tom Lee is wearing “a nattily cut beige suit and waistcoat, gold watch fob, and a tie pin that shimmered with diamonds,” when Archie meets him. Archie finally comes to Doyers Street, a short curving street, more like an alley, where the shootout at the Chinese theater occurred. “Mock Duck lived a few doors down and across the street from the theater, right on the curve, at No. 10. It was an unremarkable tenement, not unlike its unremarkable neighbors. To my surprise, there was nothing the slightest bit distinctive about it, nothing to indicate that it was home to one of the city’s most notorious highbinders. A flea-bitten mutt groomed itself on the strip of sidewalk outside, and a shingle painted with a camera and the words “Woo’s Photography” hung by the front door. From its windows, you could get a clear view of the theater, now barricaded.” Mock Duck is Chinatown’s most feared gangster but, as Archie learns, he also has a softer side. He adores his six-year-old daughter, and when the authorities suddenly remove the girl from his home, Archie begins to wonder whether their actions could be tied to the mayor’s efforts to demolish Chinatown. She embarks on a quest for the truth that takes her from Mock Duck’s orbit, to the smoke-filled backrooms of City Hall, to the Tammany Hall headquarters on Fourteenth Street, and into the Catskill Mountains. Archie comes to realize that as a city grows there’s always someone who pays the price for progress. Usually, those who can least afford it. But, she wonders if anyone can beat the odds, maybe it’s Mock Duck. Maybe, the gangster can save Chinatown from destruction and retain custody of his daughter. *** All quotes from No. 10 Doyers Street by Radha Vatsal. View the full article

When you take a deep, dark dive into a domestic thriller, there, in those murky waters, you just might see a fragment of yourself staring back. It’s that stark moment of reflection, laying bare the truth that hides beneath our carefully crafted facades. Rooted in the gothic thrillers of the past, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the psychological thriller has evolved to peel back the layers of domestic life and reveal the darkness within. In a world where social media often portrays idealized versions of reality, domestic thrillers feel more relevant than ever. So many of us strive to maintain a picture of domestic bliss to the outside world. Yet, beneath those cracks in the veneer, tension simmers and secrets fester. The ticking time bomb of the drama within is what keeps us page-turning into the small hours to get to the truth. The plot doesn’t just shift; it flies off a cliff, dragging you with it. That nice woman you thought you knew? She’s a chameleon and a manipulator. That little white lie is anything but little, leaving you to grapple with the unsettling knowledge that perhaps the monsters are not under the bed but sleeping beside us… Here are seven of the best. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a twisted and complex domestic tale of manipulation and deceit, as it masterfully weaves a narrative where the lines between victim and villain are not just blurred but deliberately distorted. Through intricate plotting and unreliable narrators, the story explores the darkest corners of a marriage, revealing a chilling dance of deception and control that keeps you guessing until the very end. And the movie adaption is a winner too, with standout performances that bring the story’s complex dynamics and chilling revelations to life. The Woman in the Window by A.J Finn A.J. Finn’s “The Woman in the Window” cleverly plays on classic film noir tropes, creating a modern-day Hitchcockian atmosphere filled with suspense and paranoia. With a narrator who is as captivating as she is flawed, the story masterfully keeps you on the edge of your seat. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train expertly utilises multiple perspectives and a non-linear narrative to create a gripping web of suspense and uncertainty. The story’s exploration of memory, obsession, and the darker side of suburban life keeps you guessing, with a series of twists that are as shocking as they are satisfying. Sleeping with the Enemy by Nancy Price Nancy Price’s 1987 novel, Sleeping with the Enemy, is a game-changing book in the domestic thriller space, as it pioneered the portrayal of an abusive relationship with heart-wrenching authenticity, and introduced a resourceful heroine fighting to reclaim her life. The chilling tagline, “She changed her name. Her looks. Her life. All to escape the most dangerous man she ever met. Her husband,” encapsulates the novel’s dark and suspenseful narrative. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins When it was published in 1859, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White was labeled a “sensation novel”, a precursor to the psychological domestic thrillers of today. The novel explores enduring themes such as the insidious nature of manipulation, and the struggle for power and identity, all of which resonate strongly today. Its examination of sexual control and the abuse of power remains particularly relevant. It’s a chilling read that gave me sleepless nights when I first read it as a teenager. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë “Jane Eyre,” can be seen as an early form of domestic noir. There’s a creeping sense of threat, a slow-boil crisis that’ll make your skin crawl. Plenty of thriller writers, me included, have been taking notes from twisted Gothic tales like this – that serve up domestic life with a side of terror and desire. The Last Mrs Parrish by Liv Constantine Liv Constantine’s “The Last Mrs. Parrish” is a riveting psychological thriller that burrows deep into the tangled webs of marriage and female rivalry. With its shifting perspectives and unsettling twists, the story unravels the dark secrets and hidden motives lurking beneath the surface of seemingly perfect lives. *** View the full article

Noir is a form I came to love when I began living in New York City, but it’s a feeling I first felt in Sacramento. I grew up in the suburbs east of Sacramento in the 1980s and my father worked downtown. We’d take the bus into the city, so fragrant with its million trees, so empty of pedestrians in many places; it was a regular Saturday event, when my dad would go in to work on weekends, writing grants for the family service agency he ran. The stony silence around the capital. The dry soft air. The prevalence of older people, and old cars, like the ones you’d see in black-and-white movies. It all felt mysterious and large, and full of portent. The capitol area was where adult things happened; my three great aunts lived around there. They resided in apartment buildings, and drove great big Oldsmobiles. Two of them had been single a long, long time. Their mother had been German and every time we piled into our own smaller car and drove west to visit them, especially Rose and Louise, I felt like I was simultaneously going back in time and farther out to sea—in a world where more complex things happened. I wasn’t ignorant of this world. I read the newspaper because I delivered it. Every morning around five a.m., my older brother and I would stumble into the garage and begin counting and folding copies of the Sacramento Bee. Some mornings both of us would scan the headlines—even as ten- and eleven-year-olds. Then we’d pedal out into the soupy early morning dark, our bikes weighed down by newsprint, our heads full of stories of the day: earthquakes, double-overtime losses in basketball, the occasional murder, and sometimes a secret pregnancy. The paper route was more than a job, it was a kind of living map for both of us. We identified houses by who lived where, and by stories we gleaned in the monthly collection visits. There was no auto-pay back then, no tap and swipe. One literally had to go and extract payment every month from customers, some of whom would even dodge a ten-year-old. And so every month, between six and eight p.m., I’d ring people’s doorbells and ask for $8.50. Some things astonish me as an adult now with a niece the age I was delivering those papers. For starters, I can count on one hand the number of times in eight years I was invited into a house while someone retrieved their checkbook instead of paying with cash. Somehow I was never bitten by a dog, although a few of them all but learned English in their attempt to make it clear I was not welcome. It snowed just twice, and the look on people’s faces who came out after it stopped made me a lifelong early riser. There were skunks everywhere. Also, people revealed themselves. Sometimes with the door open into a house, I’d hear an argument—the long, grinding argument of an unhappy marriage. I saw people leaving furtively, like they didn’t want to be seen. I smelled what was cooking, or sometimes just sour coffee. Whole worlds of stories piped out during the moments that front door was open, and then it would shut, and I’d go on to the next house. This book is an attempt to prop a metaphorical door open a little while longer, a way to invite you into a variety of houses and apartments and spaces all over Sacramento, to imagine lives, not yours, or perhaps like yours, as told by some of the city’s most talented living writers. What freedom is here in words: to travel, to visit, to linger, to hear stories from all across the city, and to some degree across time—both Naomi J. Williams and José Vadi set their stories in the 1940s/50s. This is a book of noir, so the spaces we’re beckoned into here are dark; they are sometimes not even moonlit. In Jen Soong’s story, a woman is haunted by the ghost of the child of a next-door neighbor, or that’s what she thinks he might be—she’s too far gone on drugs she’s been stealing from a pharmacy to know for sure. Meanwhile, in Jamil Jan Kochai’s tale, an ex–police detective from Afghanistan stumbles on a body in the marshes beyond his apartment building; he’s not even sure that’s what it is until two men turn up to secretly bury the man. The Sacramento River has a living presence in these stories. In José Vadi’s historical noir, the river forms a mode of escape. In Maureen O’Leary’s story, it is the last stop in a woman’s return into the orbit of a chaotic and nefarious friend. Dangerous dames are a hard theme for noir to carry into the twenty-first century without some rightful critiques. The stories here gesture toward that noir past, but reinvent it. Reyna Grande’s story about two brothers—a priest and an artist, united by their fascination with a sex worker they’ve hired to pose for an artwork—carries an implicit critique of the way women are used to represent ideas men have created about them. In Maceo Montoya’s tale, in which mural artists working in the early Chicano movement fall in love with a new female collective member, the narrator becomes so jealous that a schism develops within the group. In Nora Rodriguez Camagna’s story, a family living in South Sacramento confronts the risks of coming to this country while being stalked by an entirely different risk. In the story I contributed, a hit-and-run accident triggers a cascade of memories for an EMT worker who had nowhere to turn in a former life. How a society treats those who are down and out, people who count as its outsiders, can reveal a lot about the way that society actually runs. In a piece titled “A Reflection of the Public,” William T. Vollmann conjures a military veteran who has tumbled out of the housed life and is living in an encampment, where he finds unexpected tenderness in a lover, and in the politically charged conversation of friends. In Janet Rodriguez’s tale revolving around an errant key her protagonist finds in a thrift-store purchase, the act of returning it leads her to an eviction, one she is powerless to stop. Crime isn’t always about single acts of violence. Sometimes it’s a system devised to perpetuate other forms of violence and disenfranchisement. Two stories here situate themselves in such nexuses—within the law, and within academia. In Shelley Blanton-Stroud’s story, a woman decides she’s going to help her elderly grandmother around the house, and discovers an asset she might want to protect. In “A Textbook Example” by Luis Avalos, a young man studying confirmation bias finds himself in a situation almost predicted by his research: there’s been a murder on campus, and the description of the perpetrator sounds a lot like him. Here is Sacramento in all of its splendor and deep, not-at-all-buried contradictions. A frontier city that quickly used its wealth to gather power. A locale that is somehow not quite sure it is still urban. Darkly compelling, canopied, gusted by river smells, Sacramento emerges from these thirteen stories like a character itself. It’s the kind of place that has sprawled widely enough, and covered enough different landscapes, that it is now many cities, some of which do not interact with each other. Some of which are only remembered in names of neighborhoods which people who once lived there still use with each other: Sakura City. The West End. Broderick. What a joy and vivid dream it is to see these stories here together, between these covers—for all to visit. John Freeman November 2024 From Sacramento Noir, edited by John Freemen, courtesy of Akashic Books. View the full article

There’s a powerful scene in the 1987 Alan Parker film, Angel Heart, where Mickey Rourke’s character, Harry Angel, is staring at a broken mirror, his eyes red-ringed, his expression broken. He mutters the same five words—“I know who I am”—over and over again, but each time the declaration sounds different, more desperate, as his psyche shifts from hubristic denial to brutal self-clarity. Watch the movie, and you’ll discover that Angel’s memory loss is from an unthinkable series of events, but all of us face some degree of memory loss, or at least memory distortion, and how we reckon with that reality contributes to our sense of self. Of course, the theme of amnesia has been a trope in crime, horror, and suspense novels and films for a long time, and for good reason: memory is associated with identify, with the very concept of the human soul, and when we lose access to those memories, it is fair to ask if we have also lost access to that soul. Scientifically speaking, there are numerous reasons for memory loss, from simple aging to psychological reasons to neurological disorders, but it is rare that somebody will suffer from complete amnesia. However, amnesia does make for a great plot device and has been used over-and-over again, from early noir novels like Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Curtain and Marvin H. Albert’s Somewhere in the Night, to dark contemporary novels like Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island and S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep. In addition to the compelling plot devices, it makes sense that so many authors and auteurs focused on memory and memory loss in those early days of crime novels and film noirs. The United States had been involved in a horrific war, and many of the soldiers returned shell shocked with real neurological memory loss. But I think it goes beyond those cases of individual memory loss. The atrocities that society had witnessed were so grotesque and inhumane that there was a collective longing for amnesia. It’s easier to marvel at new dishwashers and television sets than to stare at photographs of piles of corpses. So perhaps these amnesiac characters represented American society writ large, aware of these great crimes but not wanting to face them. While the memories of World War II faded, these stories of acute memory loss continue into the 21st Century, but the causes tend to be more from repression of some unknown trauma. So what happens when an amnesiac is forced to investigate his own past? Take a novel like Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. The entirety of the novel takes place on an island that houses a psychiatric ward, and it becomes increasingly disorienting trying to determine who is sane and who is demented. This is especially baffling because the protagonist, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (who is supposed to be searching for a missing mental patient) himself suffers from memory loss and is a particularly unreliable protagonist. In the last decades of the 20th Century and into the early 21st Century, there was an abundance of research on how psychological trauma caused memory loss and repression, up to the point that psychiatric patients, encouraged by their (sometimes) well-meaning therapists, began recovering traumatic memories—of events that had never happened. Novels like Shutter Island represent that fear, and the end of the novel provides enough ambiguity that readers remain uncertain about Teddy’s past. But some of the greatest horror and suspense novels deal not with complete amnesia, but instead fragmented and shifting memories and identities. Researchers now believe that our memories change every time we recall them because of something called reconsolidation. According to Donna Bridge from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, “A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event—it can be somewhat distorted because of the prior time you remembered it” (Northwestern Now, 2012). Horror novelists have used this concept as an expressionistic art form. There is an overlap of psychosis and memory loss, sometimes within a single brain, and other times within an entire community. Mark Z. Danielewski’s experimental horror novel, House of Leaves, focuses on a family living inside of a house that seems to be changing and growing—a metaphor of our own changing and unreliable memories. A poem in the novel reads, “Little solace comes to those who grieve when thoughts keep drifting as walls keep shifting and this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves moments before the wind.” Those leaves, then, are our memories, and it is easy to lose them (or perhaps lose our minds). Iain Reid’s unsettling novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things makes great use of shifting and fragmented memories. In this novel, it become increasingly difficult to determine if the narrator, Jake, is living in his present reality or in some warped version of the past. Imagined or real memories come in conflict with his deteriorating mental state. One can easily picture him, like Harry Angel, staring into a mirror and saying/wishing, “I know who I am.” And, of course, when our narrator is uncertain of who he is, the audience loses our own guardrails and we feel uneasy and disoriented. Because an unrevealed trauma is like that monster in the dark: we can imagine the unrevealed memory being whatever we fear most. So, yeah, I’m fascinated in memory loss and memory distortion, and that’s why those themes appear in so many of my own novels (Corrosion, The Disassembled Man, The Blade This Time, Beneath Cruel Waters and, naturally, The Memory Ward). In fact, memory loss is a bit of an obsession for me, but I can’t for the life of me recall why. *** View the full article

Assignment# 1: STORY STATEMENT Chosen is the story of how a family of women, ranging in severity of criminal activity, were able to manipulate their existence through magic, lies and deceit – including waking up the dead – to get what they want, in order to survive in a man’s world. Assignment# 2: THE ANTAGONIST Sally is a tormented, and discarded individual ,who due to her physical disabilities and dark personality is shunned by her own family. Sent away as a teenager to live in an assisted living center, she is able to hone on her powers of using mind control, to destroy the lives of her so-called enemies. This "gift" which she inherited from her mother Paula (second antagonist), whose abilities to curse her adversaries, is in no way comparable to the magnitude of damage that Sally is able to conflict. Upon her return home, the two join forces to detonate the lives of Mary, (Sally’s aunt), and her cousins; primarily Mary's eldest daughter Grace, the young lady whose decisions changes the trajectory of their existence for decades to come, and generational curses and torment to follow, by Sally’s primary target being redirected from Grace to her daughter Marina. Assignment# 3: THE TITLE Chosen Discarded To What Avail Unveiling the Masks of a Murderous Coven Assignment# 4: COMPARABLE GENRES It is a combination of a few different genres in both television, movies and books: #1: “Mad Men” (the series) meets “Marvellous Mrs. Maisel” (the series), in respect of the era and the strong women protagonists in the story, fighting for survival in a male dominated world, of the decades where women were considered less than. #2: “The Twilight Zone” with a cross over into the revelations of “The Truman Show”, in regards to the unveiling of all the coverups and finding out that all were involved in hiding and distorting Marina’s reality throughout her entire life, and her mother Grace, is a complete stranger to her. In reference to novels, comparisons of my novel would be to the constant confusion through investigative journaling, that is portrayed in the book, “Verity”, written by Colleen Hoover, crossing over with the eerie coincidental accidents, and losses in love, fortune and faith depicted in the novel “Rosemary’s Baby” by Ira Levin. This leads the Genre of my Novel, to fall into the category of Women’s literature with depictions of Romance, Fantasy and Mystery connotations. The novel, displays how distorted and obsessive love leads to mysterious events to occur due to envy and jealousy, including murder, kidnapping and crimes against humanity. Assignment# 5: LOGLINE A young girl falls victim to circumstances of obsession and jealousy which leads to her losing everything of importance quicker than she had gained it, as her life was controlled by a demonic coven of evil family members. Assignment# 6: CONFLICT LEVELS A poor family who are left destitute, while the head of their family is away working out at sea for months at a time, are targeted by their own family members, who “sell” them off to a senior citizen who becomes obsessed with the protagonist, Grace. This young family, even before Grace’s birth, were victims of curses placed on them, by her own aunt Paula’s jealousy and greed. However, Paula’s abilities didn’t hold a candle to that of her daughter Sally, who’s curses were not only more severe, but deadly. Her jealousy, honed onto Grace, was detrimental to the fate of future generations. A young teenage Grace, in a moment in time fell in love and became pregnant by an obsessive 66 year old man with skeletons in his closet, just to have not only her baby stolen from her, but forced to spend the rest of her life referring to her daughter as her sister, while being dragged away to a foreign country to start her life over, without her child, in order to keep those skeletons hidden. The secrets, portrayed by her parents and siblings, takes its toll on Grace, who eventually allows herself to move on, find love again, and start a new family, but that path was filled with pain, loss and turmoil, causing her past trauma to always resurface. Curses placed upon her became more intense, effecting her chances of carrying children to term, with multiple losses, until finally she gives birth to a fighter, Marina, the Chosen one. This child survives generational curses for decades, all the while Grace hides in secret, not allowing the true reason she knows both Marina, and her other child endure pain, and strains of bad luck their entire life, as her spirit is too weak to face the truth and protect her unsuspecting children, who have lived their entire lives in the dark, not knowing what they were fighting against. Marina, unlike her mother, faces the truth head on when it becomes revealed to her, through the many mishaps that occur. Marina’s investigation into her mother’s family, whom she realized after it was too late, had been targeting her and her sister their entire lives; stealing, murdering, cursing their marriages, wombs and stability, until finally it comes to a head, when Marina finds out the truth about her sister Nina, and realizes that she is behind all the spiritual attacks meant to kill her. Nina, after being raised to believe she was abandoned by her real mother, and replaced by Marina, makes it her mission to destroy the facade of a happy little family Grace built, in a foreign country while forgetting her firstborn. This of course, is enforced by our antagonist, Sally, the murderous coven leader witch, with powers that betray human physics and psychology. She is summoned by the devil himself to destroy anything good in this world, and succeeds in painful exploitation for decades with no chance of recourse. That is, until now! Assignment# 7: SETTINGS The story is set on the tiny island of Gozo, in one of the local villages, on the hill top, with views that expand out to the open sea from one side of the island, and the other to the neighboring islands of Malta and Comino. The settings primarily take place in the homes of the antagonist, the protagonist and the village square for the first half of the novel, and flips between the village and the protagonist and her family’s multiple homes in Toronto, Canada, for the second half of the story. Description of main scene locations: The antagonist (Sally and Paula) has an aristocrat home, decorated in furniture from the 40s, dated yet still relevantly regal for the mid 60’s era. The home is where a lot of dramatic twists of fate occur, including the meeting place where an obsession begins; murders occur; plans are hatched and curses are performed in front of multiple altars, in a darkened, secretive basement that holds all of Sally’s demonic secrets and lies The protagonist’s (Grace and Mary) home belongs to the entitled aristocrat, Joey Watt. It's location wields its own story of riches and rise to great wealth and power. It is set in the heart of the village square, across from the central Cathedral and has been completely renovated to allow the modern 1963 feel, lament throughout the entire home. The stair case is one of the feature attractions of the lovely home, with granite stairs and a rod iron staircase that boasts the intricacy of the riches of the single male owner, who’s entitlement in life is foreshadowed throughout his decor and lavish lifestyle and corrupt use of power behind its closed doors. The second half of the story, is still set in the village, however most of the characters have migrated to Toronto, Canada. The story pivots locations as each chapter unveils another advancement into the revelation of the hidden truths of what occurred in the demonic days of the sixties, and brings us eventually to present day, where the story will lead the protagonist and her children back to the island to witness the incarceration of most of her enemies and deaths of others.

I was through hiding myself. It was pointless. The motorcycle taxis would tell me hello and the ginger juice vendors called me by name. The neighborhood thought I was a new maid. The old one had disappeared the night before my crime, taking with her the pc and 5,000 dollars that Yâyé Bamby had hidden in her dresser, wrapped up in an old bra. Raye told me how angry her aunt had been, so furious that day that the dogs ran off and the hard-of-hearing perked up. Just think: the money a lot attendant cousin from Philadelphia had sent so she could pay for the work on her house still under construction! So, when they saw me coming, they thought everything had gone back to normal, that she’d had the thief locked up and taken her money back. And since I was often crossing the courtyard to hang out the laundry and scour the pots and pans, I could only have been an employee of the house—certainly not a criminal. Tell me, Madame Corre, what better judge is there than the eye of a neighbor? No more worries, no hassles, no glitches. Like everybody else, I could come and go, shout and knock around, burn with desire, and sin. One evening, coming back from school, Raye handed me a mirror, her face gleaming. “Those eyes! That smile! That chest! Raise your little finger and every boy in this city is at your knees! Does it really still get your panties in a bunch that you’re a criminal? Even the traffic cops think you’re one of the good girls—they think you’re the nicest one in the neighborhood. You see, you’re absolved, forgiven, you’re wiped clear. The city is waiting for you, with its wild nights and seduction. Friday after classes I’m taking you somewhere. . . On one condition, though: you have to do my trigonometry homework. Tri-go-no-metry! Obviously whoever invented it didn’t have a brain in their skull . . . I’m offering you paradise and you’re not even smiling.” Raye was like that, she’d harvest the millet too early, like everyone suffering from surplus optimism. We reached an agreement: I’d go to the market and buy fish, eggplant, and ko-bo-kobo to make us a nice konkoyé with palm oil. And, after treating ourselves, we’d put on our finest rags and party down. When she came home Friday, she found the house in a grave silence, with no fetching aroma to delight her nose. She found me slumped on the couch, my face in my hands. “What happened . . . ? What are you trying to say? Enunciate, lady. Use your words. Did something happen to Yâyé Bamby?” I was able to stand up and speak audibly. “She still hasn’t come back from work.” “What is it then? Did they rape you again?” “They found me, Raye.” “Who’s ‘they’?” “The cops.” “After all these years? Tell me you’re joking! Please be a joke.” “Before it wouldn’t have mattered, but I have a life again now. Tell them I don’t want to die.” She sat back down and in her most serious voice said, “OK, I’ll tell them. In the meantime, try to calm yourself. What happened?” “Well, I was by the yam vendors when I saw him. He was wearing an indigo bomber jacket and big sunglasses. He was standing like fifty meters from me . . . you know, at the corner where the butcher’s and propane store are. . . and he looked at me like I reminded him of an old acquaintance. I acted like I didn’t notice anything. He made no hesitation following me. Following me! Yeah, all the way to the new church, Raye! So my knees shot up to my neck running the whole way here.” “Come on, flirts are all over this city wearing indigo bombers. I told you, Atou, you have a way of attracting men. This dude didn’t want to arrest you, he wanted to jump your bones. That’s not necessarily unpleasant—saying from experience.” She couldn’t make me laugh. Out of breath, my ears alert, I was on the lookout for signs of life outside. Kids’ voices shook me with fear and moped motors made the same noise as certain kinds of sirens. “That devil Bassikolo cursed this country! And you, Atou: beware of any man who approaches you.” Even the memory of old Ténin made me think of cops. Yâyé Bamby, who got in a half-hour later, tried to reassure me. “He’d have arrested you if he were a cop!” Raye’s invitation was still on later: nothing was stopping us from being careful. We couldn’t have made a better decision because Indigo Bomber showed up again. It was Raye who saw him this time, standing on the church steps. Two or three weeks later. “I believe you now, Atou. There’s nothing—not one thing—reassuring about this guy. He was looking at me from the side of our house. And he had in his left hand something that looked like binoculars,” she stammered in an even more frantic voice than mine the day he followed me. Yet everything was fine in the next season. At school, Raye didn’t get one bad grade. Yâyé Bamby earned a raise. She celebrated her birthday at a restaurant and let us have avocado vinaigrette, pizza, and champagne. An odd idea dawned on her as she cut the cake. “You know what we should do Sunday? Let’s tour the city then go to the beach. We’ll go dancing, just to egg on this indigo bomber scarecrow. Arrest us, if he’s really a cop! Want to know what I think? He’s no cop. He’s a prankster. He’s just trying to scare you.” These words had some sway. There was no more discussion of Indigo Bomber. He vanished from the market, the church steps, my thoughts and nightmares. “Come on,” Raye said one day after we finished cleaning out that mess of a shed. “I’m taking you somewhere! Don’t bother with makeup: no one recognizes a criminal after they’ve been on the run for three years. Plus you’re well aware Indigo Bomber’s all but evaporated. He figured out we weren’t afraid of him.” “Let’s get going, girl! You’re right, a real cop would have already shown up.” A half-hour later we were at the Oxygène, a hideout where my life was about to take a new, more surprising and gut-wrenching turn than the day I killed my father. “It’s as big and loud as a cruise ship!” “Totally, Atou! You have to come a bunch of times to get used to it.” She took me by the hand, I noticed, the way moms do on the first day of school. “Check it out. This huge courtyard is called Bagataye: that’s the maquis. They have the best aloko chicken in the city. In the middle is Folto-Falta, that nightclub I told you about. They have the best whisky, best dj, prettiest girls, and so the best fights. On your right is Motel Ziama. That’s where you’ll rent a room the day you meet a guy. Come on . . . The path in front of you leads to the ocean. Watch it, though, there’s sharp rocks and roots the whole way down.” We came out onto a pretty field of taro and palm trees a meter above the tide, after crossing through a slum occupied by squatters. Chairs and tables were set out in the middle of the grass and a rattan bar was jammed between the left side wall and the parapet. Jumping over the parapet, we landed on a little white sand beach surrounded by rocks. It was called Toes in the Water: the Oxygène’s seaside feature. “Pleasure and ecstasy! Sodom and Gomorrha! Free license and vice!” Raye laughed. “During the day, everyone’s cool just kissing. The serious stuff goes down after dark.” My first night out. I told you, Madame Corre, I didn’t know anything about life: not bars, not movies, street fairs, the zoo. “Three years is the ideal interval: any earlier and you’d be recognized; later, you’ve missed the boat,” Raye whispered as she led me back to the maquis, decorated like it was Christmas, with garlands and string lights. “Thus concludes our tour. Any time of day, you can drink here, dance, eat, and. . . he-he!” She thought, and I still wonder why, that it was only at eighteen years old that the flame of desire hissed through your body. My stay with Yâyé Bamby had in some way prepared me for my new life. A gilded prison is happier and more instructive than school, and Raye ended up convincing me that any life without weed and cold beer lacked for taste. But I insisted on keeping my virginity. To be a virgin (even if your own father already soiled whatever little jar of honey the good Lord wedged between your thighs) is to cast an eager eye on the world. Reach out a restless hand to its fountains of youth and papaya orchards cinched with snakes. We were served chicken and fish outside. Raye almost had to yell over the music and shouting. The air was thick with smoke from the grill and the beer flowed freely. After the aloko chicken, we made our way to the club. Raye ordered some beers and went to find a seat. A young man walked with an unsure gait through the crowd and passed in front of us. “If that one there cornered me in a bathroom stall, I wouldn’t cry for help.” Raye followed me on the trail once she was able to stifle her crazy laugh. Our conversation kept on despite the decibel level. “Does it really eat at you this much?” “Hey, I’ve waited a long time!” “You could wait a little longer.” “No longer than now.” “Why don’t you jump the next guy you see?” “I swear I wouldn’t hesitate if I saw the guy in that mauve velvet hat again.” But I didn’t see the guy in that mauve velvet hat just then: he’d left to go sleep off his hangover in one of the market warehouses or get picked up by the cops. Or, more likely, mortise and tenon with some girl on the beach or in that filthy bed in room 13, which everyone tried to avoid but recluses and gravediggers, drawn to the empty tombs and ruins. The music was interrupted two more times due to fights. Then Raye, barely more drunk than me, dragged me down the trail because they’d put on Papa Wemba. Two or three guys circled around us to make fun of our self-conscious walk and fiendish shaking. But the event I was hoping—or waiting—for didn’t come to fruition. In any case not right away. Ten minutes later, sitting side by side, a Rasta man bent over toward me. “Hello my same-mother, how are you?” (The Oxygène made me think of a far-away tribe, Madame Corre, with its own customs and argot. You didn’t say friend or brother or sister, but same-mother. And the city? You know what they call the city? The Other Tribe, or sometimes Babylon.) “May I extend an invitation to this young and lovely woman who dances so fine to an Afro-Cuban beat?” That’s how I met Alfâdio. That’s how my life became what it is today. A skinny boy with an athletic outline, chocolate complexion, a face like Mohamed Ali, the face of a playful kid who knew he’d only ever be liked by his mother. He danced the salsa like a god and that might be what drew me in. He wasn’t wearing a mauve velvet hat but there was an aura of similarity with the young man I’d seen earlier. Maybe it was him. “I saw you a while ago. With a mauve velvet hat, no?” “You don’t know all the things that happen to me! Two days ago, a lovely young woman like you saw me on Tayaki beach dressed like a cosmonaut.” “It was definitely you. This particular young man also had a scar over his left eyebrow.” “Maybe it was me, then, if he’d been staring at your pretty little tush.” “What?” Out of his jacket pocket, not acknowledging my outrage, he produced a mauve velvet hat. “Are you sure? I see you as more of a puncher. You don’t look like Bob Marley, you look like Muhamad Ali.” “Still a compliment.” The Folto-Falta was crackling from the music. A wonderful world tour, from jazz to salsa, Congolese rumba to samba, hip-hop to raï. Each harbor had its own rhythm, every station its pulse. I laughed and turned around in the arms of this stranger, not paying too much attention to what he was saying: the words my body wanted to hear, of course, and that knew how to reach me without filtering through my ears. The truth is, I wasn’t drunk, just a little tipsy. He was, but it kind of suited him. All around us, laughing—the same as ours—shoulders and hips and, no doubt, in their burning minds, the same feeling of innocence and freedom. Inside me was a feast; around me, the pulse of a youth bloated with optimism, drunk on carelessness. Everything was new, fascinating, unexpected. I felt feverish, transported, full of tonicity and an enchantment with life. I was wild, strong. I was free. __________________________________ Copyright & Credit: Courtesy of Schaffner Press. This work received support for excellence in publication and translation from Albertine Translation, a program created by Villa Albertine and funded by FACE Foundation. View the full article