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  2. Cale and Ambrose Casey haven’t spoken in thirty years. The brothers at the center of Brendan Flaherty’s The Dredge became estranged after traumatic events upended their adolescence. Over the next decades, each has crafted a life in which to protect himself and survive. In Hawaii, Cale sells waterfront properties and can’t seem to commit to a relationship. In rural Connecticut, Ambrose still lives in the house in which the brothers grew up, now with his pregnant wife and young daughter. When their old neighbor’s pond must be dredged to allow for a developer’s expansion plans, the brothers are forced to reconnect to ensure old secrets remain buried. Meanwhile Lily Roy, who grew up alongside the Casey brothers in a far less harmonious home, is the contractor overseeing the dredge. It soon turns out she too has secrets to protect. In The Dredge, Flaherty has crafted an intense debut novel, tightly plotted in dual present and past timelines, with a trim and three-dimensional cast of characters. At its heart, the novel asks, can we move past trauma without dredging up the secrets that shaped us? I enjoyed an engaging conversation with the author over Zoom and we discussed the psychology of his characters, self-care in writing darkness, and the complexity of finding home. Jenny Bartoy: Let’s start with a straightforward question: where did you get the idea for this book? Brendan Flaherty: I probably shouldn’t admit this, but the seed of it came in a dream. This was probably almost 15 years ago. I woke up with this picture in my head of a stick of white birch in a dark swamp, and I had this awful feeling that I’d accidentally committed a terrible crime. I wrote a bunch of pages based on that image and it just stayed with me. I could sort of feel the story in it, but it took me years of false starts to do what I wanted to do with it. That image is now just a small detail in the book, but the DNA for all of it was in there. So that’s a long way of saying: a dream of a stick. JB: This novel’s foundation seems to be trauma and what ripples from it. It can take a toll on a writer to become immersed in the darkness or difficulty of our topic. How did you manage to separate yourself from the story? BF: The book touches on dark topics, but putting more pain and sadness into this world wasn’t my intention at all. Quite the opposite. I was interested in how people can sublimate those negative experiences into something more meaningful and positive. And though the book has a bit of an open ending that I think is more true to life than anything tidy—to me, it’s hopeful. There’s tragedy, but there’s also a sense that spring is coming, and with it, healing, forgiveness, reconnection, and new life, or at least the possibility of it. So, it helped having that idea and glimmer of light in mind all along. As a writer, I suppose you’re very alone in that kind of rigorous mental work. There were a couple of times where I did have to stop. Especially during the peak of the pandemic, when everything seemed really bleak and chaotic. I was trying to take another run at the manuscript and working long, weirdly stressful hours remotely. We had a newborn and another small child at the time, and I was kind of slogging through that dark material, those difficult sections. At some point, I needed to take a break for a while and go watch 30 Rock and play with my kids and change the record in my brain. JB: I was drawn to your novel because it begins with an estrangement between brothers. Here you have one brother who stayed, one who left, and they haven’t spoken in thirty years. For each of them, their choice represents both denial and a desire to rebuild over their traumatic past. I’d love to know more about your perspective on family estrangement, and what this rupture between the brothers meant for you narratively. BF: Great question. The brothers’ relationship, cleaved in two, is at the heart of the whole thing. These traumatic things happen to them that they could have shared, or helped one another along in some way, but instead blame pushed them apart and each was alone in it. And each had a different response to managing this rupture in their lives. One ran away, and that left the other brother in a position to have to stay to protect this secret. So they’re both in bad spots. One feels he can never return home and the other feels he can never leave. Their differences seem irreconcilable, and the result is a silence between them. I’ve seen this silence, and in the case of the brothers, it keeps them stuck in the past. The brother who leaves ends up figuring out the real estate industry, and he seeks solace in surfaces, in the physical world, his material possessions. That’s how he tries to fill this void in him. JB: Right. Meanwhile the other brother goes all in and builds a local business and a family, but there’s a palpable dread to him. Each of the characters keeps secrets that define them and their conflicts but that can’t be spoken, for essentially the duration of the book. How tricky was it to plot this story? BF: Yeah, it was tricky and took me a long time. Even once I thought I’d figured out how I could make it work with the rotating point of view between the main characters, I still had to keep the rhythm of it and the differing timelines. So there was a lot of getting the timing and the calendar right. In terms of how I did that, a lot of it was in my head, but I’ve got stacks of notebooks, too. And then for more complex stuff like the present timeline and the one in the past, I used a Word doc to keep it easily editable. A lot of the material accreted over the years, and then I ended up writing the majority of what became the book as it is now in three weeks between jobs. JB: Your novel covers a lot of depth in a short amount of pages (260 pages). Do you have any tips for writers wishing to keep their work as economical yet intense as yours? BF: It’s been said plenty before, but just edit ruthlessly. I read my writing aloud over and over, and cut everything, every syllable, that I don’t feel needs to be there. How do you say the most with the least? That’s the whole challenge of language, right? So I spent a lot of time editing and going over it and over it and over it. And that’s because I want it to be as polished as I can get it, but also this is my first book and I wanted to be mindful of people’s time. Hopefully, I can communicate a story to you and you could read it quickly and get right to the heart of it. JB: It was definitely a fast read, but I was impressed with how much you conveyed psychologically in a tight space. One of your characters, Ray, is rather monstrous, but you create empathy in the reader by showing his traumatic, abusive upbringing and the love that his sister Lily has for him. How challenging was it, morally or otherwise, to write this character? BF: He was challenging, definitely. But he was also a really interesting character to me, because the way he is isn’t his fault, and yet, he’s becoming a very dangerous person with the potential to hurt a lot of people. A person who has only ever known violence — that’s essentially his experience of the world. To me, the difference in the two families [central to the book] is largely based on how the two fathers respond to their own childhood trauma. Eli Casey becomes a good man, an empathetic person who tries to help others whose pain he recognizes. Ray’s dad, Abe, does not rise above this negative cycle, and instead he perpetuates it, on his own family, no less. This pointless cruelty shapes Ray. But he’s not all bad. The same way that no one’s all good. JB: These characters for generations have gone in loops over the same landscape—the pond, the roads, the wood, the bridges over the stream. How did setting help enhance the narrative? BF: It was very important to me. That setting is based on the woods I knew growing up. There’s not necessarily a pond like the one in the story that exists or anything like that, but my experience with that real landscape was the inspiration for the setting. I’m from northern Connecticut and the house I grew up in was built in the 1820s. There’s a sense of history you can feel there in certain places. Stone walls in the woods, long-abandoned foundations, that sort of thing. To me, it has a certain mood. Knowing the setting like that was helpful because it gave me a shorthand. As I was focusing on characters or relationships or more important stuff to the story, I didn’t have to, in my mind, invent every rock. It was just there. I could see it. I had a sort of set or stage in which to put the characters. JB: There’s a definite sense of intimacy with the landscape throughout the novel. Your three main characters work respectively in construction, in real estate, and for a suburban developer. Each of those jobs relates to houses and home, to rebuilding but also burying. Of course the dredge of the pond upends all those efforts. Can you tell me about the symbolism inherent in these choices? BF: Maybe the metaphors of my Catholic upbringing and childhood Bible class are showing there, but yes, each character is longing for a home. Each is searching for a place where they can find peace. The concept of “home” seems to elude them all. As much as Lily dresses up the house she grew up in, it’s still a site of trauma. And as much as Cale can go sell luxury real estate, he still can never buy back the happy home of his childhood. And as much as Ambrose tries to be a homebuilder, like his father, something is still missing. JB: Technology is largely absent in this novel, which is a bit of a trend I’ve noticed in recent literary mysteries. Tell me about this narrative choice. BF: So many televised court cases, it seems, have a prosecutor reading text threads. I think, for one, my characters know this and are protecting themselves. They’re wise enough to not create a paper trail with texts. And the silence between the brothers predates the pervasive technology of today. I think their ages factor in a little bit too. If they were 16 or 18, I’m sure digital technology would be a bigger influence. But they’re all more of an analog type of person, of which I know many. And maybe on a personal level, I’m not super interested in the social media space, which seems like concentration-killing brain poison, even as I look at it myself now and find myself entertained. Still, it feels fleeting and not built to last. JB: Harvey is the older sleuth unable to speak due to a stroke, not taken seriously even by his wife. Why did you choose to silence your “detective” character? BF: The simplest answer is that I feel like that’s been done. There’s plenty of detective stories—writers who can do it better than I can, people with a closer relationship with police procedures, who have that sort of knowledge. So, I thought that was sort of well-trod ground that didn’t really speak to me personally. I felt there had to be some kind of police, some sort of acknowledgment of the legal threat, but I liked the idea of his presence being almost a ghostly one. I don’t feel like I chose to silence that character—that was just kind of how he always was to me. Half in this world, and half in another. Half here, and half gone already. JB: Congratulations on this debut novel. What are you writing now? BF: I’m working on the next book. I’m kind of going back and forth between two ideas. I like lighter comedy-ish stuff, like Charles Portis and Kurt Vonnegut. So there’s one book that’s light, and another that’s more in line with this one. I’m writing them both in drips and drops each morning and waiting to see which horse takes the lead. View the full article
  3. The truth is often stranger—wilder, more volatile, and somehow even more unbelievable—than fiction. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to true crime. As an author of mysteries for adults and young adults, I’m always scouring real-life, historical events for the seeds of my own stories. Here are a few true crimes that were stranger than fiction—and the books they inspired. One of the first true crime books I ever read was Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. Set at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the book’s narrative snakes between the Fair’s renowned architect Daniel Burnham and the “devil” that roamed in plain sight during the Exposition: Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, arguably the United States’ first serial killer. Holmes was a psychopath and swindler, who, among various other crimes, committed insurance fraud and built a “murder castle” near the site of the World’s Fair. Complete with hidden passages and a nefarious kiln in the basement, he is as chilling as any fictional murderer—and perhaps more so, since he really existed. In a similar vein, the nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon—and its subsequent movie release—details the systematic and calculated murders of members of the Osage Nation in the 1920s. The story is a complex web of evil, the crimes jaw-dropping, as the Osage become some of the richest people in America after the discovery of oil on their land. Their families are then systematically infiltrated, hunted, and killed off for their headrights—even by people who claimed to love them. David Grann’s book is a prime example of a mystery that almost defies belief, if it weren’t actually true. Novels, too, often shed light on true crime events by weaving them into otherwise fictional plots. This has been the case with a number of Louise Penny novels, from the 1989 École Polytechnique shooting in Canada (fictionalized in Penny’s A World of Curiosities) to the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story of Gerald Bull. Bull was a Canadian engineer who was considered to be the preeminent artillery scientist of his time. He developed a Supergun called Project Babylon for Saddam Hussein—a space-cannon with a barrel that measured five hundred feet long—and was assassinated with several shots to the head on his own front door stoop. This stranger-than-fiction story was woven into another of Penny’s classic Gamache novels, The Nature of the Beast. I count Penny’s novels to be hugely inspiring. I love mysteries, and even more so when they involve unsolved crimes from real life. Perhaps that’s why I spent so much time at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum when I was a college student living in Boston. I was fascinated not only by the museum’s lush indoor garden courtyard but by the brazen (and still unsolved) museum heist that occurred there in 1990. Thirteen priceless works of art were stolen in the middle of the night, including pieces by Rembrandt, Degas, and Manet. Their empty frames still hang in the museum today, a haunting testament to where the thieves used box cutters to cut the paintings straight from the walls. This crime has inspired a number of works, including the Netflix documentary This is A Heist, an Inside the FBI podcast, and a nonfiction tome called Stolen—the only book about the theft commissioned by the museum itself. Its opening line? “They came for the Rembrandts.” But if a wide range of works have been inspired by the Isabella Stewart Gardner art theft, perhaps even more have been written about another atmospheric residence-turned-museum on the opposite coast: Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. A visit to the island proves rife with stories about the criminals who once lived there—and the few that escaped. From Al Capone and Birdman to the three inmates who pulled off one of the most well-known prison escapes in history, countless books and movies have explored the infamous island, including Escape from Alcatraz: The True Crime Classic by J. Campbell Bruce. Others include the historical fiction series for young adults Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko and the nonfiction account Eyewitness on Alcatraz by Jolene Babyak, both of which look at the experience of Alcatraz from the unique perspective of the children who lived on the island while their parents served as prison guards. As an author, I was intrigued by some of these true events, and they planted themselves like seeds in my mind. Learning about the unsolved art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, the mysterious Alcatraz escapees, and the children who grew up on the most infamous prison island in America, all became elements that inspired my historical mystery Enchanted Hill. Set in 1930 at a fictionalized Hearst Castle, Enchanted Hill was incepted by my own trips to visit these places and the way their unsolved crimes stayed with me, using my mind like a trellis. True life is so often actually stranger and more mysterious than fiction—which is why it can inspire some of the best non-fiction reads (and novels) to keep us turning pages long into the night. *** View the full article
  4. I’ve long wanted to write a story where I take something that is considered a universal positive—the love of a parent for their child—and super-charge it and challenge it to the point where that love becomes dangerous. In my experience, we will do things to protect the ones we would love that we would never do, that we could never justify doing, on our own behalf, and that makes for a powerful starting point for a story. In my new book, What Happened to Nina?, a lovely young couple go away for the weekend, and only one of them comes home. For me the story was never so much about what happened to the missing Nina, or even so much about whether or not her accused boyfriend, Simon, is responsible for her disappearance … for me the story was always about the parents. I put myself firmly in the shoes ocf Nina’s parents, and asked myself if there was anything I wouldn’t do, any length I wouldn’t go to, to get my daughter back? And just as firmly and completely, I tried to see things from the point of view of Simon’s parents. If my son, whom I believed to the core of my being to be innocent, was accused, what would I do? What lengths would I go to to save him? For What Happened to Nina?, I wanted to put two families in crisis in opposition to each other at the centre of a story, and stand back to see what happened. I had a feeling it might be explosive. Of course, I’m not the first author to tackle this theme, or similar themes, or to write a thriller from the point of view of the parent of the accused. There’s something about the idea of having a child accused of a terrible crime that is, I think, universally horrifying and terribly compelling. Something about the slow peeling back of layers of truth, the fear that maybe we don’t know our child as well as we think we do, the fear of what we might discover next. I’d like to recommend the following four books that explore this theme, all very different, all equally captivating for their own reasons. Run Away, Harlan Coben In Harlan Coben’s Run Away, Simon Greene is a father who has lost his beloved daughter, Paige, to a drug addiction and an abusive boyfriend. Simon and his wife have tried to help Paige through multiple failed rehab attempts, and after one bad experience too many, Simon’s wife decides that enough is enough. She makes Simon promise to stop trying, to let Paige go. Simon makes the promise, but secretly he can’t do it. When Paige disappears again, he keeps searching for her and when her reappearance drags him down a dark and violent path, he can’t seem to stop himself from putting one foot in front of the other, no matter where it takes him. We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver It’s easy to look back on a book like Kevin, a book that has become part of the canon, and assume it was an immediate success. In fact, Lionel Shriver’s then agent was so dismayed by the novel’s unrelenting darkness, and by the unsympathetic point of view of the protagonist, Eva (a woman who had never bonded with her son, who didn’t even like him) that she thought it was unpublishable. The book was ultimately picked up by a small publishing house, and it grew to the behemoth it become through snow-balling word of mouth. I have some sympathy with the agent who couldn’t see the book for what it was—something brave and powerful and challenging and important—because hindsight is twenty-twenty, and to read We Need to Talk About Kevin for the first time is to discover something ugly and unsettling. Kevin is an unapologetic mass murderer. Eva is the mother who never loved him, but who, now that it is all done, can’t seem to leave him alone. The question that recurs again and again throughout the book is whether Kevin is the product of nature, or nurture. Was he born the way he is, and is that why Eva couldn’t love him, or did he turn out the way he is because she couldn’t bond with him? This book does not offer any easy answers, but it does leave us with a lot to think about. One of Our Own, Lucinda Berry And now for something a little bit different. This one is an audio original, a novella that comes in at a tight four hours and is all the sweeter for it. Felicia is an attorney and a single mom who also volunteers for a domestic violence helpline. She takes a call from a high school student, a young girl who has been sexually assaulted at a party and who is now planning to take her own revenge. Felicia is at first motivated only to help the girl, but she becomes concerned (reasonably) about the revenge plans, in particular as her son attends the same high school. As the story progresses, we learn, alongside Felicia, that her son was at the party where the assault took place. The question for Felicia, and for all of us, is where or not he was involved, and if he was, what Felicia is going to do about it. Defending Jacob, William Landay Defending Jacob was first published in 2012, but the TV adaption starring Chris Evans, which was widely praised and released in 2020, brought fresh eyes to the novel. The protagonist in this case is Andrew Barber, a well-regarded District Attorney, who takes on the case of a murdered teenage boy. He loses the case almost as quickly as he took it, when it transpires that Andrew’s son Jacob’s fingerprint has been found on the body of the dead boy. Jacob explains the fingerprint by saying that he found the body but ran away and told no-one, because he was afraid that he’d be blamed for the boy’s death. Other than that statement, Jacob is largely uncommunicative, leaving his parents to try to piece together the truth of his life, and to marry those truths with the boy they thought they knew. This book is a whodunnit, but it’s also an examination of trauma, of the lies we tell ourselves, and of what happens to a family when those lies are exposed. *** View the full article
  5. Part 1 1. A mother dealing with the repercussions of her daughter’s mental illness is desperately trying to save her daughter from herself. 2. Antagonist Liz, 18 years old and away at college suddenly becomes mentally ill and must leave college in order to receive medical treatment. She is diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. The doctors try to find the proper mixture of medication but nothing seems to be working. It is discovered that along with the prescribed medication she is taking, she is also taking illicit drugs. She must be hospitalized in order to manage her illness. But once she is released from the hospital, she stops taking her medication. Her mother desperately tries to help her but finds that because her daughter is an adult she4 has no authority over her medical treatment and has to fight with the mental health professionals to get her daughter the help she needs. Liz spends the next 30 years in and out of hospitals and living on the streets in Southern California. Her mother must raise the two children she has and battle with Liz and her husband over custody through the courts. The children feeling angry that they are not able to live with their parents and must live with their grandmother (Liz’s mother) become re4bellious. The grandmother not only has to save her daughter but also, must find a way to save her grandchildren from drugs and crime. 3, Breakout Title A. The Rollercoaster of Mental Illness Through a Mother’s Lens: A Memoir B. Saving My Daughter from Mental Illness 4. Comparables A. Finding Us: A Mother’s Memoir of Braving Mental Illness with Her Young Daughter by Kristen Rohan Rehkamp. B. Broken Brain Fortified Faith by Virginia Pillars. Both of thses books deal with the struggles of managing and coping with a daughter’s mental Illness. 5. Hook Line A mother. Examines her own part in her daughter’s mental illness while facing the challenges of dealing with the consequences of her daghter’s aactions over a 30 year period in and out of hospitals. 6. Suzanne must fight her desire and need to be a good mother or accept that she has no power to change her daughter. She comes to the conclusion when her daughter refuses to get the mental help she needs after Suzanne begs her to get help for several hours. Her daughter instead escapes out the window of her home. 7. The Setting The story begins in. the 1970’s in a beautiful home in Malibu , California overlooking a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean and concurrently in Miami Beach, Florida at the University of Miami. The story continues for a 30 year span taking the reader to Santa Barbara, California, Boone, North Carolina, and a ranch in San Diego, California. The secondary setting occurs in numerous hospials and the streets of Southern California. Part 3 The Beginning of The Rollercoaster of Mental Illness Through a Mother’s Lens: A Memoir PROLOGUE It's three o’clock in the morning. I am fast asleep. Lying next to me is my husband of twenty-five years. The phone rings. Little do I know my life is about to change. I answered the phone. “Hello.” At the other end, I hear a jubilant, energetic voice. “Hey, mom. What’s happening?” “Liz, are you okay? It’s three in the morning.” I ask, both groggily and yet worried at the same time. “Whoa, I’m great. Just been out rollerblading down by the beach. How are you?” she boasts. “I was sleeping, is everything okay?” I ask again. “ Yeah, I just called to see how you’re doing.” I decided to stay talking to her, instead of telling her I’m going back to bed, hoping that whatever is wrong, if something is wrong, she will eventually tell me. “Is school going, okay? How are you getting along with the other kids?” I dropped her off at the University of Miami in Coral Gables only two months before. This was her dream school and the only one she was willing to attend. It was the university that all the beautiful girls and football stars attended, she bragged. She had applied for early admission and after being waitlisted for several months, she was finally accepted. Liz had not done well on her SAT’s and her grades were just above average. Going to the University of Miami would prove to her she was one of the “it girls.” I was nervous to send her far away but excited that she got into the school of her choice. I also thought it would be a great experience to be away from home. We lived in Malibu in a beautiful ranch style home overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I thought the atmosphere at the school and in Miami would not be that much different from where she grew up her whole life, and she would acclimate well. Liz tells me, speaking a mile a minute, “Everything’s great. I’m going to get into a sorority and I’m getting A’s in my classes. Oh, oh and I got a job giving samples of cigarettes on Miami Beach. They only pick the beautiful girls for the job. It’s kind of like modeling.” “Liz, I don’t want you to be in a sorority your first semester or get a job for that matter, let alone that it is a job giving out cigarettes” I tell her, incredulously. “Yeah Mom, but it’s the kind of cigarettes you used to smoke, so I think it’s a sign.” She tries to convince me. “Oh, did I tell you I’m going out with one of the football players? He’s Black.” As I start to speak, she tells me she has to go and abruptly hangs up the phone. I look at the receiver, like what has just happened. Was that my daughter I was just talking to? A quiet voice in my head tells me I should be concerned, but I quickly silence that voice and tell myself That was weird. Dave, who has been listening to my end of the conversation, asks me, “What was that all about?” I quickly reassured him everything is okay, just a bizarre phone call from Liz at three in the morning. At this point, I wasn’t sure whether I should be concerned or was I just being overly paranoid. But a red flag went up in my mind. “Can you believe she was out rollerblading at three in the morning?” I ask. He doesn’t answer me and falls back asleep immediately. I on the other hand am up the rest of the night going over our conversation trying to understand why she didn’t think it was inappropriate to call in the middle of the night just to say hi and I was worried about her getting a job selling cigarettes. Little did I know this would be only the first of many conversations that would keep me up at night. And little did I know that my life was about to change forever, as was Liz’s.
  6. FIRST ASSIGNMENT: Story Statement It’s the summer of 1991. Popular and vibrant 20-year-old university student Rukmini Roy just had her heart broken. What she doesn't know yet, is that her best friend and all her other friends in her social circle are keeping a secret from her. The young man who broke her heart, Kash, has already started dating her best friend, Soloni. This coming-of-age story begins with how Rukmini overcomes betrayal by her friends. This tangled situation is only the beginning of her journey through young love, connection, and complicated friendships and eventually moving forward. Rukmini ultimately finds a sense of agency, then she finds the love of her life. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: Antagonist or Antagonistic force Soloni is the first antagonist in Rukmini’s story. Soloni is her childhood best friend. She is not an obvious antagonist as she is introduced as a shy, insecure, awkward, and studious 11-year-old. Soloni idolizes Rukmini. For her part, Rukmini loves having a loyal protege in the form of a best friend, especially since she doesn’t get much attention at home from her immigrant parents and isn’t popular at school. As they grow up, Soloni begins to show flashes of an inner darkness brewing inside, due to a jealous spirit. Secretly, Soloni hates how perfect everyone thinks Rukmini is and even Solini’s mother is constantly speaking of her praises. Soloni quietly studies everything Rukmini does, says, and wears. Friends at university start to comment on how similar they are to each other. Then one day Soloni starts dating Rukmini’s ex-boyfriend right after he breaks her heart. Soloni then preys on the sympathies of their mutual friends, swearing them to secrecy about her new relationship. There will be other antagonists but this is the one that starts the story off during a painful and confusing chapter in Rukmini’s growth. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: Create a breakout title The Chronicles of Rukmini Rukmini Roy The Loves that Led Me to You FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: Two smart comparables I found answering this question challenging to not zero in on authors that are not venerated as these were the very inspirations I had in mind when I began writing this story. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout: The main character is Olive but this collection of short stories takes the stories of other characters in her town and different key points in Olive’s life and has a self-contained story in each chapter. This is a closer look at the human condition. A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler: Tells the story of three generations in the Whitshank family. This has a similar feel to Olive Kitteridge in that each chapter is a different point in time in the Whitshank legacy and the study of how each personality in the family came to be the way they are. Others: Interpreter of Maladies by Jumpha Lahiri: This is a collection of short stories about the Bengali immigrant experience in the United States that describes the emotional journeys of characters seeking love and overcoming barriers in settling in a newly adopted homeland. Anne of Gables Green by Lucy Maud Montgomery: Adventures of our favourite red-head by the iconic Canadian author. FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: Hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound A young woman must contend with the betrayal of her childhood best friend who is now dating the man who broke her heart and she must also contend with all the friends who kept the secret of this betrayal. SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: Conflict Inner Conflict: Rukmini is struggling with just getting dumped by a guy she finally decided to give a chance to whom she normally wouldn’t date. She is nursing her broken heart and relying on her friend Soloni as a shoulder to cry on for support. Soloni has hinted that she is staying in touch with Rukmini’s ex-boyfriend because Rukmini has remained friends with Kash. There is no reason to stop Soloni from not having a friendship with her ex if they are remaining in each other’s lives. After the breakup, her ex, Kash reaches out to Soloni for a “friendship” and Rukmini feels it is for support and that he must be having a hard time with the break up as well but something feels off after a certain conversation with Soloni. She is troubled by this and doesn’t know where to place this sinking feeling. Soloni has always been a good loyal devoted friend. Rukmini asks Soloni, “Does he ever talk about me?” Soloni responds with “I’m sorry he never brought you up.” Rukmini is surprised and feels worried and is a bit turmoiled by her perception that they are getting closer. Is it friendship or could it be more? She knows Kash enough to know he seems interested in Soloni and Soloni doesn’t seem to be putting up any boundaries. They keep making plans to see each other under the guise of friendship. Soloni informs Rukmini that she enjoys her friendship with Kash because she is usually uncomfortable around men, especially given how they grew up in a conservative household. She tells Rukmini that she feels comfortable around Kash. It’s the early 90s and both young women were raised in an immigrant family so neither of them grew up dating in their teens. Rukmini desperately wishes to appear cool with the whole thing. She decides she must handle this breakup with maturity since Kash has made it clear he does not have feelings for her anymore. She silently struggles with this conflict in how she appears to the rest of the world while she is devastated by this breakup and not knowing if Kash is moving on with her best friend. Rukmini would like to appear emotionally mature and not let her insecurities get the best of her. For years, Soloni has jokingly and sometimes not so jokingly teased Rukmini about always wanting to be the center of attention telling her she has a big ego and needs to be humbled at times. She feels that Kash thought the same of her during their relationship. She does not want to be that person anymore. Rukmini wants to be seen as humble and down to earth by the people around her but doesn’t know how to be that person when she is hurting. She wants to be a better person and being a better person means being humble, without ego, more like Soloni. For most of her life, it was Soloni who was trying to be like Rukmini but now she finds herself wanting to be more like Soloni, quiet, and unassuming, the type of girl that Kash wants to be with because she imagines them eventually falling in love and getting married and living happily ever after. She confides in another friend that she is worried they are getting closer. That friend finally breaks the news to Rukmini that they are indeed in a relationship now and everyone has known about this for a while but no one wanted to break the news to Rukmini. The two of them even came out to social gatherings with their friends when Rukmini wasn’t around. She quickly rationalizes that this is for the best but she is angry at her friends for hiding this big secret and feels doubly betrayed. Secondary Conflict: While Rukmini is popular at her university and within her social circle, she didn’t grow up like this. Growing up she was never a stand-out at school and her parents didn’t pay much attention to her. Her mother was always more concerned with status and appearances and what their social standing was in the city’s thriving and growing Bengali community. Her mother was constantly comparing Rukmini to other girls in the community. Many of them were getting excellent grades but Rukmini was a solid C + student and this caused Rukmini much shame. She just assumed all her friends were smarter than her. Not only that, she had to deal with being one of the few brown kids at her school. At cultural gatherings when the Bengali community came together, her friends, discussed such things as who was on their way to receiving scholarships, who was lighter skinned, and who amongst them planned on a career in engineering or medicine. Rukmini struggled with the feeling that she disappointed her parents in all these categories. She was not light-skinned and she didn’t have a head for math or science, and the prospect of a future in engineering gave her a feeling of paralyzing boredom. She wanted romance and a life full of travel and adventure. Her father was an engineer and didn’t seem at all interested in anything Rukmini did but was mostly focused on her little brother who didn’t have a care in the world being the long-wanted son born to an Indian family. Her little brother was born when she was 10, Rukmini couldn’t help but feel that her parents finally welcomed the child they had been waiting for all their lives. He was doted upon by her parents and nobody mentioned anything about the shade of his skin. She felt constantly overlooked at home and school. She never really felt like she received any of her father’s attention or her mother's love so lived her life into her 20s constantly seeking what she saw as the ultimate validation in the form of the male gaze. She just wanted someone to notice her and tell her she was pretty. The only person who thought she was special was her friend Soloni who admired everything about Rukmini. As Rukmini experimented with makeup and styles, she likened herself as a mentor to a very eager Soloni, teaching her how to dress and display more confidence. While Rukmini struggled with her confidence at home, she felt self-assured around her Bengali community misfit of friends. While she never had a boyfriend in high school because no one showed any interest in her, by the time she started university in her hometown of Calgary it was a new beginning. It was the dawn of the 1990s and a whole new world had opened up for her. She started dressing better and had more friends in university, including her childhood family friends from the community that she had grown up with. Then finally she had a boyfriend. Kash was not the type of guy she normally dated because he was a bit of a loser, truth be told. It all began when he desperately wanted to cross the line of friendship and be her boyfriend, so she let him. Unfortunately for Rukmini, upon winning the prize of making her his girlfriend, he broke up with her after a few months saying he didn’t feel the way he thought he initially did. She was right all along; they were better off as friends. So what could Rukmini do but accept this after introducing him to all her closest friends? He seemed to take an interest in Soloni right away and that made Rukmini uneasy. Rukmini always had everything over Soloni. If she didn’t feel pretty enough, confident enough, she always secretly knew she was “better than” Soloni at least. She wasn’t insecure like Soloni. She was the pretty one, even though Soloni was the smart one. Now here is a guy who chose Soloni, over her and this is a hard pill to swallow. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: Setting The setting is in the early 1990s in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. There is a small-town feel to this mid-sized Canadian city. Some scenes take place in mostly suburban homes, community halls where South Asian cultural festivals are held, and then, when the characters are older, in nightclubs in the city’s downtown core. The city is not known for its diversity so many of the young people from different immigrant groups come together in social settings at the university, favorite local haunts, and their homes. The many young immigrant twenty-somethings who hadn’t gone away for university still lived at home and answered to their parents as most of the characters in this story are children of immigrants, twenty years after the mass immigration from South Asia in the 1970s took place in Canada. Given this era of Generation X, these children of immigrants had a more conservative upbringing than the current-day second and third-generation offspring of immigrants in North America. These characters often must deal with their parents' traumatic decisions rooted in survival mode and scarcity issues. For these characters, it often shows up as over-protective parenting all while having few financial resources and wanting to preserve one’s culture while settling in a new country. One of the first scenes is set on a blistering cold winter’s night after the two friends, Soloni and Rukmini have come back from a night out of dancing. The winter cold is piercing but Rukmini is reassured by the comfort and warmth of her friendship with one of her oldest and dearest friends as they attempt to warm their limbs in the refuge of Soloni’s car. The heat from the car’s radiator provides some respite to her icy hands and feet in the blistering prairie winter. She has been left out in the cold (by way of getting dumped by Kash) but here is her friend making her feel better by taking her on a night out to let off some steam and bond like they did when they were younger. Rukmini, after getting tipsy at their favorite majestic nightclub, in a moment of vulnerability, confessed how much she was still hurting from her breakup with Kash and how much she still missed him. Soloni appears to be comforting her but she is also masking her deceit as a relationship (unbeknownst to Rukmini) has already begun between her and Kash. They return to Soloni’s parent’s home and settle in on the pull-out couch in her homey suburban basement for an impromptu slumber party, much like they did years before as teenagers. Soloni now in the safety of her home dwelling is less guarded. She lets a few things slip. Here is where Rukmini picks up on a few clues that Soloni may be hiding something from her regarding the nature of her relationship with Kash. There are flashbacks to warmer Calgary summer days when life was full of promise and when Rukmini’s romance with Kash was just blossoming. The sky is crisp, endless, and blue, as Alberta is known as “Big Sky Country” so the possibilities were endless and hopeful as to where this new romance was to lead Rukmini. It began at the Calgary Stampede, an annual country exhibition and fair that has been enthusiastically celebrated in the city for generations. Kash wins a huge stuffed animal on the fairgrounds for Rukmini and she is charmed by him. This begins their romance. Cultural events at community centers, halls, and old churches play a big part in the setting of this story. When there is a cultural festival, immigrant groups rent out these halls decorate them with their cultural ornaments, and gather together for food and prayer. While many cultural groups now in 2024 have dedicated temples and cultural clubhouses, at the time in the 90s many of these buildings and gathering locations were still being built after years of fundraising. Here families and participants dress up in their best cultural garb, bring potluck, feast, pray, and rejoice, and hold shows showcasing local talent in the community to entertain all who are invited. It’s something that’s looked forward to by all the Bengalis around the city from different neighborhoods eager to come together a few times a year for Navrathri Holi or Durga Puja.
  7. Yesterday
  8. A look at the month’s best new releases in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers, via Bookmarks. * Ben H. Winters, Big Time (Mulholland Books) “A weird and wonderful cautionary tale … It features the month’s most engaging investigator, a schlumpy bureaucrat roused to action.” –Sarah Lyall (New York Times Book Review) Colin Barrett, Wild Houses (Grove Press) “Barrett’s dialogue, spiked with the timbre of Irish speech and shards of local slang, makes these characters sound so close you’ll be wiping their spittle off your face … The craft of Wild Houses shows a master writer spreading his wings — not for show but like the stealthy attack of a barn owl. Despite moments of violence that tear through the plot, the most arresting scenes are those of anticipated brutality … Barrett cleverly constructs his novel … Given the pervasive gloom, the fact that these chapters spark with life — even touches of humor — may seem impossible, but it’s a measure of Barrett’s electric style. Tense moments suddenly burst with flashes of absurdity or comic exasperation. Clearly, those years of writing short stories have given Barrett an appreciation for how fit every sentence must be; there isn’t a slacker in this trim book. Even the asides and flashbacks hurtle the whole project forward toward a climax that feels equally tensile and poignant, like some strange cloak woven from wire and wool.” –Ron Charles (Washington Post) Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black (Harper Perennial) “Stunning and intense … At once a rivetingly dramatic procedural and an intimate portrait of a relationship forged in trauma.” –Bridget Thoreson (Booklist) Andrey Kurkov (transl. Boris Dralyuk), The Silver Bone (Harpervia) “It is a gift for crime fiction fans that he writes in this genre … Kurkov, as filtered through the supple translation of Boris Dralyuk, infuses The Silver Bone with wry humor.” –Sarah Weinman (New York Times Book Review) Tana French, The Hunter (Viking) “Suspense is in the details — small details — scattered throughout … The extraordinary sequel to … A singularly tense and moody thriller, but it’s also an exceptional novel because of its structure.” –Maureen Corrigan (Washington Post) View the full article
  9. There once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, “You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother’s throat. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” I came across this Grimm tale while conducting research for my novel, Monsters We Have Made, a story which also begins with a terrible crime committed by children: in this case, two young girls who fall under the sway of a mysterious creature they discover on the Internet. Like the fairy tale, my story, too, explores questions of boundaries: play violence versus real violence, fiction versus reality. And like the Grimm Brothers, I’m interested in the power of stories; especially the ones that live beside us, within the spaces and the relationships where we feel most at home. When I think about “domestic horror,” I think about tales like these—in which what we fear comes not from the woods or from the sky, but from people and places familiar to us. Although the domestic horror genre isn’t particularly new, and it isn’t even new to Crime Reads (see this primer from 2019), most definitions focus on physical horrors: knives, ghosts, corpses, exorcisms. But while writing this novel, I’ve realized that some of the most powerful and haunting works are those that explore something slightly different, something I’d call a horror of the domestic: by which I mean the psychological and emotional toll or terror of being a parent, a caretaker, a wage-earner, a spouse. What’s most horrific in the Grimm Brothers’ tale above, and in the stories I’ve gathered below, is that the terrifying situation cannot be easily understood or explained. And perhaps this is, in fact, where true domestic horror lies: in our inability to explain to ourselves, to each other, why and how the people and spaces with which we are most intimate can suddenly, unpredictably, irrevocably strip our peace and certainty away from us. Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child, 1988 Friends recommended The Fifth Child to me in the early days of this writing project, when I told them what I was working on. Harriet, the mother in Lessing’s novel, gives birth to what she refers to as a “goblin” or “troll” or “changeling”—her fifth child, Ben, who sucks her nipples black and blue and deliberately injures his older brother and kills a friend’s dog. What do you do with a monstrous child? How does society handle a mother who hates her child? How does a parent choose between caring for one child and caring for the others? Motherhood is “a series of impossible choices,” as one reviewer of this novel observed, and Lessing conveys this reality in direct and lucid prose. She dismissed critics’ attempts to determine what the novel was really about, calling their efforts a search for a simple solution when the horror of the book is that there is no simple solution; there is only the trap of the world, and of your own decisions, and of the life that you’ve created for yourself. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, 1915 What could be more horrific than waking up transformed into a giant insect, or—in certain translations—a “monstrous” vermin? Approximately twenty-five percent of the population is frightened by insects and spiders, and Gregor’s family is understandably horrified at the sight of his new beetle-like form. Gregor, on the other hand, is more horrified by how his transformation impacts his ability to earn an income. “‘What a quiet life our family has been leading,’ said Gregor to himself… [feeling] great pride in the fact that he had been able to provide such a life for his parents and sister in such a fine flat. But what if all the quiet, the comfort, the contentment were now to end in horror?” Nearly all of Kafka’s novella takes place within the confines of the domestic space, and the story reminds us that food, shelter, comfort, and stability are never guaranteed. What happens when we’ve outlived our usefulness? Will we still be valued by a capitalist system—by our friends, family, and dependents—if we’re unable to work? Is it possible that uselessness and loneliness are even more horrifying than giant vermin? Perhaps! Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch” in Her Body and Other Parties, 2017 Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch” incorporates many of the tales and urban legends collected in Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. I remember how wonderfully terrifying I found these books as a child, and it’s a pleasure to spend time with a narrator who also remembers the girl in the graveyard, the bride in the corpse’s wedding dress, the killer with the hook for a hand. It’s wonderfully terrifying, too, to see how Machado revisits and adapts “The Girl with the Green Ribbon” (from Schwartz’s In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories) so that the horror in her version is much deeper and more complex than the physical horror of seeing a girl’s head roll off her body. In “The Husband Stitch”—the title referring to a surgical procedure terrifying in and of itself—what’s truly horrific is living as a woman in a world built by and for men; what’s horrific is the expectation that the narrator give and give and give of herself until she has nothing left. When her husband insists on untying the green ribbon that she has asked him never to touch, she pleads: “I’ve given you everything you have ever asked for… Am I not allowed this one thing?” The answer is no. “As my lopped head tips backward off my neck and rolls off the bed,” she tells us in her final line, “I feel as lonely as I have ever been.” Leila Slimani, The Perfect Nanny, 2018 (Original French: Chanson Douce, 2016) “The baby is dead,” opens the English translation of Slimani’s award-winning psychological thriller. “It only took a few seconds… The little girl was still alive when the ambulance arrived. She’d fought like a wild animal.” Slimani’s novel (like mine) was inspired by a true crime: in this case, a New York nanny who murdered two children under her care. At first glance, the darkness of this book is obvious: there is little that horrifies more than infanticide. Yet the novel centers not on the act itself, but on the political and cultural anxieties in which it is embedded: a working parent’s fear of leaving her child in a stranger’s care; the desperation of a domestic worker trapped in a life of isolation, insecurity, and economic distress; the terrifying realization that no matter how many references we check, how much security we pay for, or how intensely we love, calamity can strike. The mother in Monsters We Have Made spends more than a decade after her daughter’s crime trying and failing to figure out exactly where she went wrong. When did the play violence turn serious? What kind of darkness lurks in the nooks and crannies of our homes? How do we ensure that our worst fears do not befall us? To the most important question of all—Is there anything we can do to keep ourselves safe?—domestic horror says, resoundingly and irrevocably: No. *** View the full article
  10. In my new novel SLEEPING GIANTS, the director of a children’s home uses a draconian new treatment method. Despite being without any scientific backing, this treatment has been heralded as the latest cure for troubled children. It’s cruel, invasive, and dangerous, and has already been implicated in the deaths of several children. Like so many who commit harm, the director is convinced she is doing the right thing. She thinks she is helping, not hindering. She believes she is on the right side. Even as her harm becomes obvious, she refuses to admit she is wrong. Instead, she doubles down, and commits even more violence to protect herself. It’s an issue that haunts me, as I know it does many others. Why is so much harm committed by those who think they are right? Slavery. The holocaust. Mass incarceration. The internment of Japanese Americans. Wars. Torture. Abu Ghraib. Lobotomies. Genocides. The list is endless, and I’m sure you could add many more. There’s an argument to be made that the worst harms of mankind come not at the hands of those who are social outliers at the time, but perfectly normal citizens, convinced they are doing the right thing. I see it all the time in my justice work. For decades I’ve worked as a licensed defense investigator. I’ve worked hundreds of cases, from juvenile to death row exonerations. Far too often I’ve looked at a child facing prison time, or a man wasting his life behind bars, and I’ve wondered, who is the bad guy here? Daily I wrestle with the brutality of a nation that blithely destroys lives, all in the name of justice. This everyday evil, I think, is underexplored territory for crime writers. Most crime fiction focuses on the outliers—the outright, obvious sociopaths, usually unexplainably brilliant—or else criminal underworlds, like gangs or drug cartels. This is all interesting stuff. But I think it has the effect of othering violence. It assumes there is a world full of normal people who are blameless, who couldn’t fathom the idea of committing harm even if you suggested it. This creates a false dichotomy, an us vs them that is troubling and honestly, kind of disingenuous. It’s true, most people don’t go around committing egregious crimes. Not directly, at least. But spend a few hours on a next-door neighbor site and you can see the seething anger that boils into outright discrimination, the rage that leads people to the voter’s ballot to pass even more punitive laws, and elect officials who will do their dirty work for them. These regular, everyday citizens might not be the ones administering the lethal dose, or locking people up, or torturing children, but they are the mass behind the monsters. Collectively, they can become the monster. This is not confined to politics or borders. Some of the most vicious people I’ve ever met have been the self-proclaimed enlightened. It’s the motive under the act that intrigues me, not the placard above it. In Sleeping Giants, I wanted to dig into those motives. In the novel, sleeping giants are massive stone age carvings found in Arizona. But the real sleeping giants are the secret, hidden pains, and anger inside us that can come out in misdirected rage. In my experience, when these sleeping giants are awakened with a cause—especially one driven by white supremacy, misogyny, or other biases— a permission slip to commit harm is signed, sealed, and delivered. For the director, the treatment method appeals to her own unexamined hurts and anger. It’s a chance to hurt others as she was once hurt. I think this is behind a lot of societal harm, only we poo-poo it. For some weird reason, we separate our acts from our feelings, as if we operate from some higher, clinical self when making decisions. Nothing could be further from the truth. As my friend and playwright Claire Willett once said, “honestly the best marketing scheme in history is men successfully getting away with calling women the more emotional gender for like, EONS, because they’ve successfully rebranded anger as Not an Emotion.” I would add that cloaking rage as reason is the defense of most offenders. Just as there was never any science behind torture, or conversion therapy, or the other atrocities I mentioned, there is no good reason behind most the harm we commit. We may go looking for excuses after the fact—inventing science, inventing reasons—but these are not the true motivations. Those are just the rules we invent to give legitimacy to our cause. When we believe others are harmful, then it becomes easier to put them in cages, and arm ourselves against their release. We write books where we exorcise all our fears and hates into an effigy called the bad guy, and we burn him at the stake. But what will we do when we turn around and see everyone watching is the bad guy? This is the dilemma we must face in fiction and in life. Initially, I worried this story would lack in tension. There is the director, and a little boy in the center named Dennis, who becomes the target of her rage. Twenty years after Dennis goes missing, his sister learns of his existence and goes looking for him. In the process she uncovers decades of crimes. Without the artifice of a conventional bad guy, could I keep the reader turning the pages? Once we abandon the idea that crime is committed by the other, we open ourselves up to more realistic characters… What I found is there is more than enough tension in real life scenarios. In fact, I think they are scarier, because what happens in Sleeping Giants is real. The bad guy is a smiling, nice-looking lady that people trust. She could be your neighbor. She could be any of us. She doesn’t even think she is bad. Once we abandon the idea that crime is committed by the other, we open ourselves up to more realistic characters, and this includes the heroes, too. In Sleeping Giants, the hero is not some hard-boiled detective, but the sister. This young woman, Amanda, has some learning differences. To my knowledge, she’s the first hero with these particular differences, but they are not the center of her story. The center is her longing for truth, and knowledge. That’s enough to get her in a lot of trouble, as many women know. In her efforts to find the truth, Amanda is abetted by a cop, but once again, he’s an ordinary person. Larry Palmer is recently widowed, and grieving. He’s bored and lonely in his small coastal town, where the center was located. Larry has committed harm in the name of good, too. Everyone in this story is in a path of reckoning. There’s been a lot of discourse lately about “unlikable” women characters and unreliable narrators. I think the hunger under these conversations is for books that deal with the fact that good people can do bad things. Sometimes very, very bad things. Or they might stand around and applaud when others do the bad things, and when justice finally comes to call, claim they weren’t there at all. In other words, we want real people on the page. None of this is to shame anyone. We’re all capable of harm, whether against others, ourselves, or other critters sharing our planet. In fact, there are animals in Sleeping Giants, and I wanted to thread their realities into the novel. There is a rabbit that Dennis likes to watch at the center, and a polar bear that Amanda cares for at the zoo. Both have their stories, too. In my own work, I’ve found the more divorced people are from their internal selves, the more separate they are from the outside world. It’s an interesting pattern, and one reason I believe that connecting with nature is so important. It doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive. Just being outside, and feeling part of the world, can help people believe their feelings matter, too. As long as people devalue their own sleeping giants, they will overinflate their rage, and become convinced that is who they are. Which is sad, considering how soft and tender we really are, inside. At the end of Sleeping Giants, the director finally has her reckoning, and it is not the punishment some might hope. I’ve noticed that even behind bars, most guilty people don’t admit their wrongs, just as they don’t admit them outside of prison, either. It’s on the rest of us to fix their mistakes. And try to prevent more. Because just as we are capable of everyday evil in the name of good, we are also capable of profound healing, joy, and goodness. That is the final, hopeful message of the book. By facing down our inner hurts and angers, we can heal ourselves and make better decisions. The sleeping giant, once awakened, turns out to be not so bad after all. *** View the full article
  11. When I was young, I spent Friday afternoons at my maternal grandmother’s house with the pages of supermarket tabloids spread out in front of me on the living room floor. You know the ones: The National Enquirer, The Weekly World News, The Weekly Globe, and others of that ilk. Some had stories just unbelievable enough to feel true to a child of the Christ-haunted South, where we felt the supernatural lived with us cheek-by-jowl, close enough to smell the sharp tang of sweat mixed with Aqua Velva on a preacher’s neck as he spoke in tongues on a Sunday morning. With those pages splayed out before me, I was subject to a slew of adult-oriented advertising. Virginia Slims cigarettes were often featured on the back cover of the tabloids along with the slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby!” I remember that slogan often when I think about Southern fiction, and Southern noir and gothics in particular. For years, this kind of fiction was the bailiwick of mostly straight white writers. While there were always outliers like Truman Capote, the genre bent naturally toward heavyweights like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Larry Brown. But in recent years, that’s changed for the better. While white men still dominate the genre, the modern Southern literary landscape is much more of a mirror to what the actual South looks like, with LGBTQ+ and BIPOC writers finally getting space to tell stories of marginalized characters to a rapt audience. I remember sitting with S.A. Cosby at the Conference for the Book in Oxford, Mississippi in April 2023. We were at the hotel bar drinking brown liquor and telling tales of our similar dirt-poor upbringings — his in Virginia, mine in Alabama — and talking about the tradition of Southern crime writers. A tornado warning had forced organizers to cancel a planned Noir at the Bar reading event, and we were making the most of it. We talked about what makes his work so special. What it came down to, he said, is that “the South belongs to Black people, too.” Of course that’s always been the case. But in the here and now the voices of marginalized writers have arrived with the gale force of a hurricane blowing up from the Gulf of Mexico, bringing winds and waves that are transfiguring the shoreline of Southern fiction right before our eyes. Cosby’s trifecta of masterworks—Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears, and All the Sinners Bleed—are as powerful as anything published in the crime genre since the turn of the century. Here are some more crime and gothic writers reshaping the mythical South as we know it on the page and making it far more universally appealing to readers. Jesmyn Ward Might as well start off by talking about the elephant in the room. Jesmyn Ward is a National Book Award winner and recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and every time she turns her keen eye toward her family’s native Mississippi—and particularly the Gulf Coast—it’s worth reading. While Salvage the Bones is the book that won the National Book Award, readers should check out Sing, Unburied, Sing first. It’s a modern masterpiece of Southern Gothic fiction, and one of its narrators—the ghost of Richie, who cannot accept or understand his death—haunts me still. Ward is a force of nature by herself, flattening readers with the power of her prose. If you’ve never read her, you are in for a treat. Kelly J. Ford Kelly Ford is not a household name. Not yet. But her three novels—Cottonmouths, Real Bad Things, and The Hunt—have all been lauded for their realistic, sensitive, and timely portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters in the Deep South. A writer with deep roots in her native Arkansas, Ford pens characters full of longing, heartache, and isolation and shows us that these themes are as universal to people of every gender and sexual orientation as you’d suspect. Cottonmouths, especially, is an incredibly passionate look at how accurate Faulkner’s words about the South were when he wrote “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Peter Farris Arguably one of the best writers of modern Southern fiction can’t seem to stay published in the United States. Farris, whose 2022 novel The Devil Himself should have marked him as a major player in crime fiction, is far more popular in Europe, where the strangeness that lies at the heart of so many Southern stories seems to be more accepted and even encouraged. If the grotesque is still a part of the Southern Gothic’s makeup, Farris’s mannequin-loving Leonard Moye will shake readers with his warped sense of love and loyalty, as well as his deep well of humanity. Wanda M. Morris Wanda Morris fooled me with her fantastic first novel, All Her Little Secrets. After its success, I thought she’d likely be writing twisty mainstream thrillers with some Southern ornamentation on the side. I’m so happy to have been wrong. Instead her second book, Anywhere You Run, immerses the reader into Jackson, Mississippi in 1964, when a Black woman murders the white man who raped her. With the murders of three civil rights activists weighing heavily to influence Violet’s mindset—and the novel’s plot—Morris leans into the Southern aspect of the crimes and chops at the virulent racism rooted in the time and place. Morris’s next book, What You Leave Behind, looks to be just as hauntingly Southern. Eli Cranor Eli Cranor’s 2022 debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, won the Edgar for best first novel as well as a finalist for the Anthony Award (and should have won it, too). One of the most striking things about Cranor’s debut was the voice of Billy Lowe, a talented running back for his Arkansas high school football team. Some readers took issue with Lowe’s point of view, considering it a ‘Black’ voice. However, as someone who played sports with poor kids across several different races, Lowe’s voice was an authentic depiction of a young man who was poor and desperate and isolated. It was a perfect inversion of expectations, especially when set against the characterization of his head coach. I can tell you that writers like these have changed the way that I approach writing about the area I’ve called home for most of my life. If, as a popular T-shirt down here says, “Y’all means ALL,” then the stories of the modern South will continue to resonate with readers from all walks of life for years to come. *** View the full article
  12. Last week
  13. On the first day I joined the Select Committee Investigating the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, I was told to watch my back. An administrative aide and I were walking from Capitol Hill’s main campus to our own intentionally nondescript, off-the-beaten-path office building after collecting my ID. I noted that I would be walking to work every day: an envious 15-minute commute door to door. He advised me to switch up my route. Daily. “You know, in case you’re being followed,” he said. I had come directly from serving as a homicide prosecutor. I had held murderers and gang members to account for years. Made them and sometimes their families upset with me. I had heard how they talked about me in their jail calls. Never in my seven years there had anyone made a warning like this one. I brushed it off and laughed. I didn’t end up taking divergent paths to work. And – although our Committee received an unprecedented mountain of threats, so many that two staffers were tasked with sifting through them for credible ones – I thankfully never felt in danger in my 15 months studying the first nonpeaceful transfer of power in our nation’s history. But the staffer’s concern was an apt reflection of the growing normalization of political violence in this country. Candidate Donald Trump came onto the political scene encouraging his supporters to “knock the crap out of” dissenters in his crowds, and he promised to “pay the legal fees” for them. Because the millions marching in the streets after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 “made him look weak,” then-President Trump suggested law enforcement should “just shoot them in the legs or something” and sic “vicious dogs” on them a la Bull Connor during the throes of desegregation. On the Committee, I focused on President Trump’s attempts that same summer to federalize the D.C. police under his singular command, invoke the Insurrection Act to waive the illegality of deploying active-duty troops against domestic citizens, and clear out constitutionally protected demonstrations using tear gas and rubber bullets to stage a photo-op with uniformed military leadership. It comes from the top. His foot soldiers heard the message loud and clear. I always intended One in the Chamber to be satire. A fun-house-mirror reflection of our powder-keg political climate. A clarion call for changing course before we devolved into the pure, unadulterated chaos foregrounding the story. But as I wrote and time passed, the exaggerated lens I used to expose our culture’s deep cleavages stayed the same but our commitment to the ‘war’ in ‘culture wars’ deepened. The two – fiction and truth – began to merge. A man mailed homemade pipe bombs to prominent Trump critics. A teenager crossed state lines with an AR-15-style rifle intending to exact vigilante justice on liberal protestors he viewed as rioters, two of whom he killed and one he injured in what he – and a jury of his peers – said was self-defense. The home belonging to the former Speaker of the House was broken into by a man with a hammer who then pummeled her husband in the head with it when he couldn’t find her. A group of men put together and finalized a detailed plot over the course of several months to tie up and kidnap the sitting governor of Michigan. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s real life – not a story. Political leaders have always faced violence. Some of it sounding straight from the pages of a novel. Everything from a Manson family devotee named Squeaky Fromme pointing a loaded gun – no rounds in the chamber – at President Gerald Ford to the man who shot President Ronald Reagan to impress the actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had developed an obsession unbeknownst to her. The difference today is that the inspiration for and legitimization of the violence is coming right from the top. The pipe-bomb mailer said that attending Trump rallies – a cocktail of grievance politics and spun-up aggression – was like “a new found drug” for him. The acquitted teenage vigilante is celebrated on a certain conservative news network for the shooting deaths he wrought, a solemn event, justified or not. Conspiracy theories ran wild online, boosted by Elon Musk and Donald Trump himself, justifying the aggravated battery against an elder man merely for being married to the opposition party’s putative leader. And detractors highlight that some of the men seeking to hogtie the Michigan governor were acquitted as proof of some sort of false flag, despite the fact that nine of them pled guilty or were convicted by a jury for their crimes. It feels like so long ago – and the narrative surrounding it, at least for half of the country, has changed since its immediate aftermath – but a roving crowd of thousands stormed the U.S. Capitol, set up a makeshift noose and gallows on Capitol grounds, and came within 40 feet of the fleeing Vice President who they were openly and loudly calling to be hanged. Donald Trump had, earlier that morning, gone from a rally script that mentioned Mike Pence zero times to including – after a combative call between the two men where the Vice President insisted he could not unilaterally discount the votes of the majority of the country – repeated references to his second-in-command and inciting the hopped-up crowd to “fight like hell.” Despite knowing that many in the horde were armed. The Secret Service had warned President Trump that large swaths of people were choosing not to enter the venue and submit to the magnetometers in order to keep their weapons from being confiscated: “I don’t f’ing care . . . they’re not here to harm me,” he said, acknowledging they were there to harm someone. And, yet, he riled them up and directed them to the Capitol, where all of the country’s political leaders were staged like sitting ducks. After that, nothing feels so far-fetched anymore. One in the Chamber follows a group of junior Capitol Hill staffers – notoriously underpaid, overworked, and maltreated – as they plot to kill their egomaniacal bosses. It was meant as an extreme thought experiment intended to raise the alarm on where we might end up if we don’t tone down the rhetoric and stop painting our political opponents with targets on their backs. But you don’t need an overactive imagination to picture it after all. Just pick up a newspaper. *** View the full article
  14. Years ago, I was describing the Lunar New Year celebrations to a friend of mine. I told her how huge my family is—my father has six siblings, my mother has eight, and every single sibling had multiple children, which means I have seventeen first cousins on my father’s side, twenty-five on my mom’s side, and too many nieces and nephews to count. During Lunar New Year, or as we call it within the Chinese community—Chinese New Year, we gather and give hong baos—red packets—to children and unmarried relatives, and it is utter chaos. We all have varying levels of organization when it comes to the red packets. Some of my more organized relatives actually specify each individual niece and nephew’s name on the red packets. I’m more chaotic, so I just write down “G4,” short for “4th Generation” for my nieces and nephews and they each get the same amount of money because I can hardly keep track of my own kiddos, let alone my cousins’. And the whole thing is rife with landmines. Our first year after we got married, my husband and I gave too little in the red packets; what my mom later told us was an “offensive” amount. Mortified, we over-compensated and gave way too much in the second year; what my mom said was a “showing off” amount. It took a couple more years after that to gauge what was an appropriate amount of money to put into those red packets. Anyway, I was telling my friend this, and she said, “It would be hilarious if you set an Aunties book during Chinese New Year, and the wrong red packet got given to the wrong person.” I was floored. What an utterly perfect setting for the third and final installment of the Aunties series! After all, the Dial A for Aunties brand is known for its comical chaos. As I began to plot The Good, The Bad, and The Aunties, I learned quite a few lessons on how to turn a holiday into the setting for a crime novel. The first thing I did was to make a list of my favorite parts of the holiday. My favorite part of Chinese New Year is getting to see all of my extended family members together at once. Because of how huge my family is, it’s rare that we all get together, and I love the noise of having everyone be in the same space. My second favorite part is the food. Despite there being so many of us there, somehow there is always so much food that we can never finish it all. My third favorite part is all of the cultural traditions—the giving out of red packets, the wearing of auspicious colors like red or gold, the well wishes that we have to recite upon seeing one another, the mixing of the yu sheng—a fish salad that everyone has to mix together using extra long chopsticks to ring in a fortuitous year ahead. Once I had all of these highlights, I then focused on how the crime, in this case illicit businesses and kidnapping, can fit into the holiday. My friend had come up with the brilliant suggestion of having a specific red packet go to the wrong recipient, so I considered what could be in that red packet, and who it was meant for, and whose hands it might fall into. And what would be the consequences of that mistake? Then, I focused on how the characters could use the CNY celebrations to their advantage, how they might sneak into places they wouldn’t otherwise have access to and how the chaos of the holiday would work in their favor. Something that has given me great joy with the Aunties books is the ability to share my culture with the world. I moved to California when I was sixteen, and I found out to my surprise that many people had no idea what Lunar New Year is and how in many Asian cultures, it is the biggest holiday that we celebrate. As I wrote The Good, The Bad, and The Aunties, I treated it as a big celebration that everyone is invited to, and I’m so happy that we get to close the series with such a bang. *** View the full article
  15. When I started writing a novel about conspiracy theorists, I had a pretty good idea what to make of them. I was a cynic. I had followed the lawsuit brought against Alex Jones by the families of the Sandy Hook victims. I had read tweets doubting the authenticity of the bombing at the Manchester Evening News Arena in 2017, where 22 people were killed in my hometown. I started writing Day One in lockdown, as I watched anti-vax protestors target medicine watchdogs, hospitals and NHS test centers. I walked past lampposts where their stickers were pasted, describing immunization and face masks as the Incremental Steps to Total Enslavement. I rolled my eyes and kept walking. But once I started writing Day One, I encountered a problem. I wanted half of the novel to be narrated from a conspiracy theorist’s perspective, and the character was despicable. He was cold and unknowable. I could imagine readers skimming his pages, eager to return to the families he torments. In 2022, while I was grappling to edit the novel, the Policy Institute at King’s College London conducted research for the BBC which found that one in five people (19%) think the victims of terror attacks in the UK are not being truthful about what happened to them. This was not a band of fringe aggressors, and nor was it people sheltering in their basements with stockpiles of tinned food, waiting for the apocalypse to come. These were real people, and plenty of them. If I was going to write about them, I would need to understand them, same as with any other character. * If you’re investigating conspiracy theories, it’s impossible not to buy into conspiratorial thinking—temporarily, at least. You must trawl the same websites, read the same comments, suspend the same disbeliefs. The first fact that surprised me—that made me think, begrudgingly, fair enough—was the number of conspiracy theories that have a kernel of truth at their heart. The most stunning example of this relates to vaccine skepticism. It is easy to laugh at the prospect of governments using the COVID-19 vaccine rollout to gather data and track their populations, and easier still to guffaw at the prospect of Bill Gates spearheading this effort. But it is harder to laugh once you know that government agencies— namely, the CIA—have used this exact tactic in the past. In 2011, when the CIA was trying to track down Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, they organized a fake vaccination rollout in the town where they believed he was hiding. The aim of this rollout was to obtain DNA to provide evidence that the Bin Laden family was present. The false rollout was so carefully devised that the project was arranged to begin in the poorer part of the region to achieve greater authenticity. In this context, conspiracy theories followed a thread of logic I could understand. Conspiracy theories had exploded during the pandemic; it was the closest I had come to buying into conspiratorial thinking myself. Lockdown was over, but to change my approach, I would need to plod back to those strange, lonely days, and sniff out the reasons why so many people had started to doubt the world as they knew it. This is what I found. I take these theories from my own experience of lockdown, rather than any specific dataset. First, there was fury; and from that fury, suspicion. During 2020, my grandmother and uncle died, and I was not permitted to attend their funerals. Our prime minister bumbled from one illogical diatribe to the next, excruciatingly incompetent. In the time since, it has transpired that the government and their advisors were lying to the population of the UK. While our relatives died alone, they held parties at Downing Street, conducted extra-marital affairs, and traveled to scenic beauty spots. I do not believe that they planned to use COVID-19 to subdue the free will of the population – that would have required a degree of organization I doubt they could have achieved – but I have no trouble in believing that they were deceitful and callous. Mysteriously, some 5,000 of Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages, sent at the height of the pandemic, disappeared prior to the COVID Inquiry in 2023; “I don’t know the exact reason,” the former prime minister said, “but it looks as though it’s something to do with the app going down and then coming up again”. In this political landscape, it was not difficult to believe that facts were being hidden, and truths half-told. Secondly, isolation. London was entirely still, shuttered up, emptied of pedestrians and traffic. Who didn’t become strange, life reduced to a small apartment, hair uncut, stewing in your own company? The only communities that remained open were online. Communities of conspiracy theorists have their own sense of exclusivity, centered around the belief in something that most of the population appear to be missing. What better place to shelter? Thirdly, time. For some of us, there was a lot of it, and one of the only places to spend this time was on the Internet. Online you are vulnerable to your own extremism; some research has found that YouTube’s algorithm, for example, can direct users towards ever-more extremist content. A query for videos about a particular suspicion may risk serving up ever-more deranged conspiracy theories, their creators ever-more certain of the beliefs they peddle. Finally, poignantly, there is the search for order. When Professor Cynthia Wang (Northwestern University) was interviewed about COVID conspiracy theories in 2021, she admitted that the theory that microchips are hidden in vaccines provides for ‘a very clear and compelling story. That’s a much more comforting story than saying, I don’t know if these vaccines really work’. All writers love a good story, and manipulation and intrigue is much more seductive than the real tale of the universe, its confusion and uncertainties and absurdities. Equally, some stories that unfold in this world are too difficult to bear. Of the early Sandy Hook doubters, Elizabeth Williamson writes that ‘Many of [them] were young mothers who could not come to grips with the murder of so many children so young’. Better government manipulation and crisis actors. Better a conspiracy. * What does my conspiracy theorist character look like, now? I found that I couldn’t fit the world of conspiracy theories into a single entity and maintain a believable creation. Day One instead offers a glimpse into all sorts of conspiratorial ways of thinking. There are the cultish leaders who peddle conspiracy theories; these characters will never have my sympathy. There are people who dedicate their lives to conspiracy theories, whoever they happen to wound along the way; and I continue to peep into their worldview with caution, unsure where they may turn their obsessions next. . But at the heart of Day One, there is Trent Casey, a character starved of human connection and seeking a community he can call his own. His circumstances conspire to a run of bad luck which any one of us may suffer: familial isolation, bereavement, rejection by the journalism profession he wishes to join. He is no longer despicable, but painfully ordinary. That, after all, is a much more frightening prospect. *** View the full article
  16. I may be just a wee bit obsessed with reality TV competition series – or so I’ve been told. Survivor (the OG), The Amazing Race, Big Brother, Alone, and most recently, Squid Game – The Challenge – are all addictive, guilty pleasures to binge-watch with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of wine (awful combo, I know). I even decided to set my latest thriller, Everyone Is Watching, against the backdrop of an over-the-top reality show where secrets, revenge, and the quest to become the one lucky winner turn deadly. I mean, when you think about it, reality TV has all the elements of a great binge-read: A cast of wildly unpredictable contestants, some you love, some you love to hate, back-breaking and mind-bending challenges where at least one participant goes down with an injury (or worse), backstabbing, front-stabbing, endless mind games, and one lucky winner. Here are five mysteries and thrillers that put the thrill in books with a reality TV twist. Like a Sister by Kellye Garrett “I found out my sister was back in New York from Instagram. I found out she’d died from the New York Daily News.” What an opening line! Kellye Garrett yanks us right into this twisty tale about two sisters. Reality TV star Desiree Pierce is found dead on a playground in the Bronx under suspicious circumstances. When the police and media rush to call the tragedy an overdose, Desiree’s sister, Lena, knows something isn’t quite right and will do anything, even putting herself in harm’s way, to get to the truth. The Favorite Sister by Jessica Knoll Who can resist a reality series called Goal Diggers? And what could go wrong when five successful women, including two sisters, come together to appear in the edgy series set in NYC? One word: murder. In The Favorite Sister, we can’t help but take a hard look at our preoccupation with reality TV, fame, and our obsession to remain relevant in a world with a short attention span. The Running Man by Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman This dystopian thriller was first published in 1982 by iconic author Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman. Set in the year 2025, desperate father Ben Richards needs money, and a lot of it, to get his daughter the medical attention she needs. His only option? Taking part in the deadly reality game show The Running Man. The challenge? If Ben survives for thirty days after being stalked by an elite squad of hunters whose only goal is to kill him while millions watch, he will win one billion dollars. If you haven’t read this high-octane thriller, what are you waiting for? The Last One by Alexandra Oliva When twelve contestants sign up for a reality competition series entitled The Woods, they are dropped off in the middle of nowhere to face a series of challenges and are pushed to the edge – physically and mentally. Immediately, the game takes a deadly turn, and one of the show’s producers, Zoo, lost and isolated from the others, has to sift through what’s real and what has been manufactured for ratings. Navigating dangerous terrain and an unknown enemy, Zoo has only her wits to rely on if there’s any hope for survival. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay When fourteen-year-old Marjorie Barrett begins to display troubling behavior, her parents take her to their family physician, but they are unable to offer any answers. Desperate for help, the Barretts turn to the local Catholic priest, Father Wanderly, for guidance. Convinced that an evil entity possesses Marjorie, Father Wanderly believes the only way to save her is through an exorcism. Out of work and drowning in household and medical bills, the Barretts reluctantly agree to have their experience filmed for a new reality series called The Possession, which becomes an overnight sensation. What the camera captures is terrifying and will change the Barrett family forever. Years later, Merry Barrett, Marjorie’s younger sister, reflects on her family’s dance with the devil; she comes to question everything that occurred in the home and what was real in front of and behind the cameras. *** View the full article
  17. COMING OUT IN MOSCOW: A COLD WAR MEMOIR Based on my experiences as a gay man in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia, the memoir covers the period from 1970 (at age 19) to 2017. During this time I made 27 different trips (some for extended periods) to the country that was America's ideological foe and "other" throughout the Cold War and beyond. Drawing upon detailed journals from nearly every trip (as student, professor, researcher, tour guide, journalist), the memoir focuses on the relationships (romantic and otherwise) I formed with gay men living in a hostile homophobic environment, and their deep bonds of fellowship. But the main theme is my own story: my struggle to come to terms with my sexuality and how these experiences in Russia helped me to find my place in the world. The antagonist is this story is not one person, but homophobia. As a young gay man growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I faced stubborn resistance against my homosexual desires from my family and surroundings in a small New England city. Later I travelled around the world, to escape this oppressive environment, but still brought these feelings with me wherever I went. My engagement with Russia began when I was a teenager and lasted for decades after that. Ironically, it was in Cold War Moscow that I experienced some of my warmest and most successful friendships with other gay men living an underground existence. Their camaraderie inspired me. When I returned to the USA, I brought these feelings with me. My experiences in Russia helped me better understand the nature of homophobia in different cultures. In many ways the main antagonist in this story was myself, fighting against my true sexual and emotional nature. BREAKOUT TITLE: 1) COMING OUT IN MOSCOW: A COLD WAR MEMOIR This is, I believe, my strongest title, which gives a sense of what the memoir is about and the environment. 2) other possible title: HOW I FOUND SIGNS OF GAY LIFE IN MOSCOW AND THRIVED THERE 3) other possible title: ADVENTURES IN THE SOVIET GAY UNDERGROUND: A MEMOIR COMPARABLE TITLES: FIREBIRD: A MEMOIR by Mark Doty HEAVEN’S COAST: A MEMOIR by Mark Doty BECOMING A MAN: HALF A LIFE STORY by Paul Monette GAY BAR: WHY WE WENT OUT by Jeremy Atherton Lin
  18. Impeachment. Charges of sedition. A president with a very low approval rating. Treasonous members of Congress. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff leading a movement to oust the president in a coup. All of those stressful plot points are from director John Frankenheimer’s 1964 political thriller “Seven Days in May,” and ably demonstrate why political thrillers are not only well, thrilling, but also sometimes predictive and all too believable. That film is one of the best films and greatest paranoid political thrillers in movie history. Each of the films I’ll cite here are not only entertaining bangers but also reflective of – or prescient of – the political turmoil of the time. Witness what is probably the best-known of those thrillers, “The Manchurian Candidate,” released a full year before the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and eerie in its story of a plot to kill the Democratic Party front-runner for the presidency and replace him with a flag-waving, pro-America populist who is secretly an agent for a foreign power. These paranoid political thrillers have made a couple of generations of Americans wonder about what high-level machinations are happening while we are, figuratively, sleeping. Dupes, traitors and heroes Political thrillers have been a part of movies since movies began. One of the best mid-century examples is “Saboteur,” released in 1942 and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Robert Cummings plays an aircraft factory worker who chases a saboteur across country, along the way uncovering a plot by neo-Nazis to unleash domestic terrorism in the United States. The film is chilling in its depiction of a high-society band of Nazis in their efforts to reach out from their New York mansions and undo America’s efforts in World War II. There’s also a sequence that seems like it was spliced in from another movie when the good guys take refuge with a circus sideshow troupe. There were plenty of spy thrillers that distinguished themselves in the 1940s and 1950s, but it is the 1960s that remain the golden age of political thrillers and it’s possible to argue that one director, John Frankenheimer, released a one-two punch that’s never been topped in the genre: “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962 and “Seven Days in May” in 1964. “The Manchurian Candidate” is justly famous for the sweaty and twisting plot following soldiers who come home from the Korean War quite damaged. Frank Sinatra plays Ben Marko, who’s still working for the military, now on Capitol Hill. Laurance Harvey plays Raymond Shaw, regarded as a hero for saving Marko and their fellow soldiers. Shaw’s mother, played in chilling fashion by Angela Lansbury, and his stepfather, played by James Gregory, want him to support their political aspirations. And supporting them means committing murder. The movie plays with our minds and the minds of the returning soldiers, who are having nightmares about their time in captivity in Korea. In bizarre dream sequences that appear to play out at a meeting of a garden club, we see that Marko and Shaw were brainwashed by Russian and Chinese officials, led by Khigh Dhieg as a specialist in putting their brains in a blender and setting sleeper agents loose on the United States. (Dhieg was familiar to a generation as Wo Fat, the Professor Moriarty figure on “Hawaii Five-O.”) The story plays out during a presidential campaign and a “witch hunt” for Communists in the U.S. government. Not surprisingly, the loudest voices are themselves dupes. No dupe, however, is Lansbury as Eleanor Iselin, Shaw’s mother and duplicitous wife of Gregory’s senator “Big John” Iselin. Lansbury was nominated for an Oscar and she deserved to win for her low-key, chilling performance. Just two years later, in 1964, director Frankenheimer released “Seven Days in May,” which might be my favorite political thriller of all time. Adapted from a novel, “Seven Days” is a thriller about an attempted coup against American President Jordan Lyman (Frederic March), who is widely criticized as being soft on the Soviet Union. One of his chief critics, who seems to be positioning to run for president himself, is General James Mattoon Scott (played by Burt Lancaster), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But Scott isn’t waiting for the next election cycle: He’s conspiring with other high-ranking military officers and members of Congress to oust Lyman under the cover of military exercises, troop movements and a test of a national emergency broadcast. Standing in the way of the coup is Marine Col. Jiggs Casey, played by Kirk Douglas, who begins to suspect his boss, Scott, is up to something dire. He approaches the president and his skeptical advisors, including Martin Balsam as the White House chief of staff, and Edmund O’Brien as a boozy senator (a role that would earn him an Oscar nomination). The president dispatches his small circle to get evidence of the attempted coup, which puts O’Brien’s senator character in harm’s way as he barges onto a secret base. Meanwhile, Balsam’s character confronts a vice admiral played in a surprising small role by John Houseman, then better known as a producer. The films were shot in black-and-white, which stamps a date on Frankenheimer’s work but also gives them the aura of a documentary. More than 60 years ago, the writers, casts and director combined to create entertainment that might have seemed far-fetched at the time but seems like a Bizarro world version of events since that era. Downbeat endings, glamorous stars The 1970s were a great time for the political thriller, largely because our federal government seemed ripe for abusing norms, and political assassinations had left the American public shocked and demoralized. Of course, the Alan J. Pakula adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s book “All the President’s Men,” released in 1976, is in many ways the political thriller to end all political thrillers. I consider the movie not only one of the great films of the decade but also one of the great journalism films of all time. And it’s got more than its share of paranoia, for sure. But the most gripping political thrillers of the decade were “The Parallax View,” released in 1974, and “Three Days of the Condor,” released in 1975. My friends and I used to tune in every time “The Parallax View” was on cable to watch a trippy sequence of fast-paced images used to brainwash characters. (The 1970s was also a big time for movies with sinister/soothing montages, including “Parallax” and “A Clockwork Orange” and “Soylent Green.”) But we also enjoyed how “Parallax” made its mark among films of the time with decidedly downbeat endings. The always lovable Paula Prentiss plays a Seattle TV journalist who sees the assassination of Sen. Charles Carroll, a leading presidential contender. Prentiss’ character goes to Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) and tells him that several people who were present for the assassination have died in the three years since. It is a classic thriller set-up, as Frady investigates the Parallax Corporation and its designs on the presidential election. Tense scenes follow as Frady begins to investigate and his editor, played by Hume Cronyn, begins to worry that his reporter is losing his mind. Frady has narrow brushes with death as he gets closer and closer to Parallax. The supporting cast, including William Daniels and Kenneth Mars, is excellent, and director Alan J. Pakula – who also directed “All the President’s Men” and “Klute” – punctuates the believable story with hair-raising threats. For a smoother, more easy-going – as bizarre as that might sound – version of the paranoid political thriller, “Three Days of the Condor” features Robert Redford as lowly CIA officer Joe Turner, an analyst who looks for coded messages in books. In a non-descript office in New York City, Turner’s job is incredibly mundane until one day, when he goes to pick up lunch and returns to find his coworkers have been killed. Turner starts the process of “coming in” to get the protection of his superiors, namely Cliff Robertson, and avoid an assassin played by Max Von Sydow. Turner quickly learns he has no allies, however, except for a woman (Faye Dunaway) who he initially takes hostage to find a refuge. Director Sydney Pollack brings the right tone of menace and uncertainty to the film, but Redford – at the height of his powers and acclaim – is too attractive to really worry about: No one this gorgeous, with his shaggy blond hair and peacoat, could ever be in real danger. Add to all that one of the most unexpected climaxes in movies, as Redford and Von Sydow talk over the spy business, and “Three Days of the Condor” will leave you experiencing all the chill and happy feelings that “The Parallax View” did not. An afterthought: the ‘80s Political thrillers might have peaked in the 1960s and 1970s but a few others followed, like “Missing” in 1982, with Jack Lemmon as an American businessman looking for his son in Chile, all the more chilling because it told a true story. There’s “Cutter’s Way,” starring Jeff Bridges, John Heard and Lisa Eichorn as friends caught up in a small-town tale of power and the importance of remembering who your friends are. “Cutter’s Way” has stuck with me since I saw it in a theater in 1981. “The Jigsaw Man” featured Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier in a cross-Atlantic thriller. And of course there’s the “Bourne” series in the past couple of decades. Two more of note: “The Osterman Weekend” was dogged by a lot of reviewers when it opened in 1983 – not including me: I found it “for the most part, quite fascinating.” It was director Sam Peckinpah’s last real feature film, from the Robert Ludlum novel, and starred Rutger Hauer, Burt Lancaster, Craig T. Nelson, Chris Sarandon, John Hurt and Meg Foster, the woman with the most hypnotizing eyes in cinema. And “The Formula,” a 1980 thriller directed by John G. Avildsen (“Rocky” and “The Karate Kid”), featuring a dream cast topped by George C. Scott and Marlon Brando, in a modern-day struggle to bring forth – or suppress – a World War II-era synthetic fuel that would replace oil. It seems like a strange time, an election year that finds the country as deeply divided as it’s been in a hundred years, to recommend political thrillers, but those films might be the only chance we’ll get to indulge in the safe aspects of fractious and dangerous political times. View the full article
  19. Like any genre, cozy mysteries have a set of story qualities that make them what they are. For cozies, five primary qualities define the genre: amateur sleuth, light-hearted tone, no bloody violence, no graphic sex, and no hard profanity. But where does one draw the line? Can a story touch on real-life issues that might seem heavy to the reader? Is a dramatic slap violence? Is alluding to a steamy romp too much? And what about well-placed “Oh, hell!” or “damn?” Might the strict adherence to cozy conventions sell short some readers’ curiosity and appetite for something a little different? The main character in my “Hayden & Friends [Quozy] Mystery” series is a twenty-five-year-old single gay man who lives in a big city. Bringing Hayden to life authentically on the page requires that I invite his entire self into the story, including his personal life and societal issues directly affecting him. Getting the balance right between keeping it real and keeping it cozy can be tricky. To help explore the challenge, I asked five authors who push boundaries in their cozies about their motivations and work. In Fresh Brewed Murder, Emmeline Duncan incorporates heavier themes of gentrification and homelessness into a genre whose hallmark is a lighter tone. Emmeline: “I’ll never push the boundaries just because they’re there, but I will when it’s a vital part of the story. The issues I dealt with are realities of my main character’s world as an operator of an inner-city coffee cart. They are authentic to her life and issues everyone in her community deals with. When incorporating societal problems, I want to be careful not to oversimplify the issues or villainize or stereotype any characters. I also do my best to keep a hopeful tone in the book.” In Homicide and Halo-Halo, author Mia P. Manansala didn’t sugar-coat her main character’s struggle with issues of mental health. Mia: “I wanted to lightly touch on the topic of mental health but didn’t realize how central it would become to my protagonist Lila’s character arc. At first, I wanted to keep it light because people usually pick up cozies for comfort and escapism and might not want to read about such a heavy topic. However, no matter how many times I tried to go the light and fluffy approach (this is not a knock against fluff; we all need fluff), the character would fight it, and the book would stall. Only by leaning into the mental health aspect did I feel like I was doing the character and her story justice.” In her “Pies Before Guys” series, author Misha Popp’s main character is an unconventional—to say the least—cozy protagonist. I wondered if she hesitated about centering a series on a hero who’s also a killer. Misha: “Not at all. I knew I wanted Daisy to be a sweet and sunny murder girl right from the get-go. But I know readers aren’t always quick to jump on board with murdery protagonists, so I definitely made sure she had enough relatable traits to balance out her vocation. Still, at her core, she’s the vigilante baker I wish I could be!” Nikki Knight’s Live, Local, and Dead doesn’t shy away from politics and social issues. Did she have concerns about including that content? Nikki: “When writing it, I didn’t really see this as a political book. I saw it as a celebration of local radio, which has been absolutely decimated by right-wing talk on satellite. There’s no way to tell that story without bumping up against politics. We live in a world, not in a sitcom episode from 1955. I get my inspiration for characters from my friends, family, and colleagues, who are, thankfully, a whole rainbow of people!” In his “Dante & Jazz” series, Michael Craft doesn’t hide the fact that his main character enjoys an active sex life. Did he think twice about going there? Michael: “I had no misgivings about this at all. On the contrary, I couldn’t imagine writing a first-person narration by a gay man whose thoughts never turn to sex. The reader is privy to Dante’s sexual fantasies and actual exploits, though they fade to black. Because it was never my intention to write a ‘traditional cozy,’ I saw nothing controversial in breaking rules that I’d never bought into.” I was also curious whether these authors received pushback from their agents or editors or feedback from readers—positive or negative—about including their boundary-pushing content. Mia: “I’ve mostly received positive feedback from readers about including the heavier content. My Asian American readers, in particular, have expressed gratitude about including aspects of mental health in my books as it’s such a stigmatized topic in our community. My editors will flag things in the manuscript as maybe too strong or harsh for a cozy with suggestions on how to make it more palatable, and they’re very often right. I don’t include controversial topics for shock value.” Nikki: “Everyone on my team loved the book. It was only when it showed up on NetGalley, billed simply as a Vermont cozy mystery, that things got … interesting. A couple of great early reviews and then a wave of people who came in expecting a cute little story and were very angry with what they got. And me.” Michael: “No pushback from my agent or editor. What little feedback I’ve gotten from readers regarding the erotic edge of my books has been only positive.” Misha: “The overall response to Daisy and her mission has been overwhelmingly positive. I have zero regrets about including ‘controversial’ issues in the book, and for every one-star review I’ve had complaining about it, I’ve had plenty more readers telling me just how they wish Daisy could’ve saved them from the abusers in their pasts. I don’t see anything wrong with daydreaming about the ability to murder-pie yourself to safety.” Emmeline: “No one on the business side has had an issue. Most readers have responded well and appreciate that my story feels real while still being a cozy mystery. This isn’t to say everyone loves it, but that’s fine—no book is the right fit for every reader.” Finally, I asked the authors what advice they would give to others considering stories that push the cozy boundaries. Nikki: “Be true to yourself, your work, and your characters. But be prepared for a small, vocal segment of folks who aren’t ready for it … and hang in there.” Michael: “Simply write the story that you want to tell. If your goal is to deliver a story for a specific category of reader and meet their expectations, then sure, check all the boxes and stick to the rules. But if that’s not your goal, don’t sweat the imagined boundaries. You can’t please everyone.” Misha: “If you wrote something that is unexpectedly being considered for the cozy market, ask plenty of clarifying questions regarding positioning and packaging to ensure everyone’s visions are aligned.” Mia: “Make sure you understand the genre and its conventions well, so when you choose to push or break a boundary, you do so with purpose. I have great respect for cozy mysteries and read widely in the genre, so I know what I like about them and what areas need a little push.” Emmeline: “Be purposeful. People don’t read cozies to be shocked but to build relationships with the characters. When you push the boundaries, you want to keep the world hopeful and a place your readers want to visit. Staying true to your vision will help you develop an audience that wants to read your work.” *** View the full article
  20. Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Abigail Dean, Day One (Viking) “A gripping examination of a community devastated by a school shooting and the “truthers” who deny it ever happened. Within that story is a girl who’s hiding what she knows about what happened that day. A chilling, thought-provoking read. Brilliant.” —Shari Lapena Scott Carson, Lost Man’s Lane (Atria/Emily Bestler Books) “Lost Man’s Lane is masterful story-telling — a heartfelt, deeply creepy tale of lost innocence and the evil that lurks beneath even the most placid American surfaces.” –Justin Cronin Jesse Q Sutanto, The Good, The Bad, and the Aunties (Berkley) “Sutanto delivers another addictive romp, managing to negotiate a thrilling (multi) happily-everafter finale because, alas, this concludes the Aunties series.” –Booklist Robin Peguero, One in the Chamber (Grand Central) “One in the Chamber is a wild, wickedly fun ride! Robin Peguero’s latest delivers a smart thriller-mystery while also turning a satirical eye on Capitol Hill culture and the twenty-somethings that underpin it, ricocheting among their desires for power, friendship, love, sex, and vengeance. I devoured this book!” Shelby Van Pelt Heather Gudenkauf, Everyone Is Watching (Park Row) “[A] diverting tale that will have readers flying through the pages to learn what happens next.” –Booklist Dervla McTiernan, What Happened to Nina? (William Morrow) “McTiernan turns the traditional thriller on its head by exploring the why and the what over the who….And that is truly haunting.” –Kirkus Reviews Kristen Perrin, How to Solve Your Own Murder (Dutton) “The pace is quick, the red herrings are plentiful, and Annie’s growth from timid wannabe writer to confident sleuth is beautifully rendered. Combining elements of Agatha Christie, Anthony Horowitz, and Midsomer Murders, this is a richly entertaining whodunit from a promising new talent.” –Publishers Weekly Kristine S. Ervin, Rabbit Heart (Counterpoint) “The author’s investigations of the concept of victimhood are insightful and urgent . . . Ervin laces the poetic text with unforgettable moments of startling, shattering honesty, many of which feel impossible to witness. This is the genius of the author’s prose and what makes this book remarkable: Ervin’s unflinchingly brutal gaze, combined with her insistence on facing the worst parts of her past, make it equally impossible for us to look away.” –Kirkus Reviews Stephen Graham Jones, The Angel of Indian Lake (S&S/Saga Press) “It is the perfect conclusion to this trilogy of ghosts and monsters, both earthly and supernatural, and of secrets that must finally be brought to the surface. A story masterfully told, but most of all, one that provides a final girl to cherish…Jones has given the world a gift, an epic tale for the ages, both a violent, high-octane slasher and a frank, thought-provoking indictment of the U.S., past and present.” – Library Journa Lisa Scottoline, The Truth about the Devlins (Putnams) “The tense mystery plays out as a catalyst for redemption and family healing—Scottoline’s heart-warming specialty. . . . A new family thriller by best-selling Scottoline is automatically a must-have.” –Booklist View the full article
  21. When people ask what kind of books I write—especially people who are obviously younger than me—I catch myself biting my tongue at the instinctive response. Tell someone that you’re a “technothriller author” and you’ll get a sideways glance. The same reaction I imagine you’d receive if you said you were a landline phone repairman, or a dodo bird watcher. Raised eyebrows. Scrunched eyes. “Is that actually a thing?” The question is valid. Walk into a bookstore today and you’ll find shelves divided into more nuanced categories than ever. Domestic thrillers. YA. Paranormal fiction. But not technothrillers. Former biologists (like me) might say that it seems they’ve gone…extinct. That’s quite a shift from the world I grew up in. In 1984, at the peak of the Cold War, an unknown author with thick glasses and a baseball cap released a book through the Naval Institute Press about a missing Russian nuclear submarine. In many ways, Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October was a typical page-turner: plucky-but-underappreciated analyst Jack Ryan winds up in a breakneck race to prevent worldwide disaster. But what made The Hunt for Red October different—what made it special—was Clancy’s focus on the submarine. Page after page was devoted to explaining how submarines worked, how they navigated the complex topology of the ocean floor, and how this particular sub had been engineered to run silent and deep. Within months, The Hunt for Red October became a national phenomenon. After President Reagan called it “my kind of yarn,” it shot to the top of the bestseller lists, selling over 4 million copies. And with that success, a new category was born. Clancy wrote 18 more novels, 17 of which became bestsellers. Within five years, his stories were being adapted into films featuring the biggest stars and directors of the day. The Hunt for Red October’s cast included James Bond (Sean Connery) and Darth Vader (James Earl Jones), directed by the man who’d helmed Die Hard (John McTiernan). 1992’s Patriot Games starred the undisputed king of action films, Harrison Ford. The technothriller craze became bigger than just Clancy, though. In particular, it ballooned thanks to another superstar author, a lanky, Harvard-trained M.D. who’d been writing novels for 15 years before The Hunt for Red October was published. You could argue that Michael Crichton beat Tom Clancy to the punch and invented the technothriller with books like The Andromeda Strain (1969), The Terminal Man (1972), and Congo (1980). All of those featured breathless pacing combined with credible technology hooks thanks to Crichton’s science chops. But while Crichton had hit the bestseller list, he wasn’t quite the household name Clancy was…until a certain book about dinosaurs. Jurassic Park hit shelves in 1990, the same year The Hunt for Red October hit movie screens. Like Crichton’s previous works, it featured the promethean theme of humanity threatening its own existence by creating or unearthing something uncontrollable. It contained Crichton’s typical, meticulous research on cloning and DNA extraction, distilled down in a way that was approachable to lay readers. And it had dinosaurs—lots and lots of dinosaurs. Species readers knew well, like Tyrannosaurus rex, but also new ones, like velociraptor. The book even contained the then-fledgling idea that, instead of disappearing completely, dinosaurs had morphed through evolution into modern birds. Given how prehistoric creatures can capture the imagination, it wasn’t long before Jaws director Steven Spielberg gobbled up the rights to Jurassic Park and delivered us the CGI moment/meme of Laura Dern and Sam Neill standing up in their Jeep at the sight of a living, breathing brontosaurus. From there, Clancy and Crichton seized a vicelike grip on entertainment. Clancy’s universe birthed more movies, then videogames. Meanwhile Crichton continued pumping out books and movies himself, while also conquering television. Through the blockbuster ER, Crichton introduced an entire generation to medical terminology like “CBC,” “Chem 7,” and “stat!” By 2000, it seemed the technothriller would be with us forever. But a funny thing happened in aughts: people stopped talking about technothrillers so much. Maybe it was a natural letdown after the futuristic-sounding turn of the millennium. Or, as technology became increasingly prevalent in our everyday lives—as the Internet became pervasive and smartphones grew ubiquitous—maybe society as a whole wasn’t as impressed by glimpses of the near-future. It certainly didn’t help that the genre’s two leading lights also left us. Crichton died in 2008 and Clancy followed five years later (both at the age of 66—how about that for an odd coincidence?). Just last year though, after a decade-plus, publishing appeared to have its own seeing-the-brontosaurus moment. First, the trades announced that James Patterson would be finishing Michael Crichton’s final manuscript, Eruption. When the mainstream press caught word, they cooed that the book would be the “biggest thriller of 2024.” Everywhere, it seemed, was the news that the technothriller had returned! At last! Except…the technothriller never died. It never even went away. Like dinosaurs, cloaked in feathers as birds, technothrillers have been hiding in plain sight this whole time. Take James Rollins. While he may not have the name recognition of a Tom Clancy or a Michael Crichton, he’s been more prolific than either of them—31 books and counting—and is a perennial bestseller. Having practiced for years as a veterinarian, he brings the same kind of scientific background to his novels that Crichton did, but he happens to mix those techno-elements with bits of fantasy and mysticism. Straddling that line may be why Rollins has never been expressly crowned as the heir to Clancy and Crichton. The Clancy estate has also continued publishing books, with other authors like Marc Cameron, Mark Greaney, and Andrews & Wilson taking up the Jack Ryan mantle. Although these books typically get branded as “military fiction,” they carry on Clancy’s tradition of delving deep into the high-tech aspects of modern warfare. For example, Don Bentley drew extensive applause for the way he wove hypersonic aircraft into the plot of his most recent entry in the Clancy-verse, 2023’s Weapons Grade. Although Andy Weir’s work is deemed science fiction, his novel The Martian and its eventual film adaptation are unquestionably Crichton-esque technothrillers. Indeed, the scientific tricks botanist Mark Watney uses to survive on Mars and communicate back to Earth are more grounded in reality than several of Crichton’s plots; they just happen to play out in outer space rather than in Africa (Congo) or underwater (Sphere). Another author who defies today’s categorization schemes is Blake Crouch—I have seen his books listed among science fiction, psychological fiction, horror, and mystery. But the niche he most seamlessly fits into is technothriller. Whether taking on quantum mechanics in Dark Matter or the neuroscience of memory in Recursion, Crouch has proven extremely adept at blending approachable discussions of difficult technology with mind-bending plots that keep the pages turning late into the night. Having followed all of these authors’ careers closely—indeed, having tried to emulate them with my own Seth Walker series, and now The Lock Box—I have never worried about the future of tehcnothrillers. The genre is alive and well, thriving in their talented hands. But, like everyone else, I can’t wait to read Eruption. *** View the full article
  22. Has anyone who attended last weeks conference received the contact info from those publishers who requested to see your work? Thanks! SEcReynolds

  23. Although the manta “show, don’t tell” have been spoken thousands of times in creative writing classes and workshops, the injunction is essentially meaningless. For one thing, it sets up a false opposition, an either-or, as if there is an opposition between showing and telling. But all writing is telling, achieving one overall result because, when a dramatic scene or exchange of dialogue exists, the showing conveys information. That is, it tells. It would be impossible not to. What “show, don’t tell” is really trying to say is, “don’t tell with flat, dull prose.” Bad imaginative writing happens when telling provides information without an iota of showing. But showing doesn’t have to be dramatic scenes or dialogue exchange. The telling must be alive, animated, not merely related. Unlike, say, reportorial journalism that tells us what happened, imaginative fiction makes us experience what happened. Good writers have found a number of alternatives for accomplishing that animation. Techniques of animating include: visual details, lively verbs, personal voice, rhythms, attitude toward the telling—e.g., between the lines messages. The central point is a liveliness behind and beneath the informational content of the words. The language should convey a complexity embedded in and inseparable from the words. Here’s an example of showing while telling in a paragraph from a Lauren Groff story titled “The Wind”: They were so far out in the country, the bus came for them first, and the ride to town was long. At last it showed itself, yellow as sunrise at the end of the road. Its slowness as it pulled up was agonizing. My mother’s heart began to beat fast. She let her brothers get on before her and told them to sit in the front seats. Mrs. Palmer, the driver, was a stout lady who played the organ at church, and whose voice when she shouted at the naughty boys in the back was high like soprano singing. She looked at my mother as she shut the bus door, then said in her singsong voice, You got yourself a shiner there, Michelle. The opening sentence is told information, facts about the location of the children’s home—far from town in the country. But the next sentence does not just report that the yellow schoolbus arrived. Instead, it can be seen “yellow as sunrise.” Next, it doesn’t just pull up slowly. It’s emotionally agonizing, and by implication to the narrator’s mother with the anxiety of a beating heart. Stout Mrs. Palmer as church organist reveals something about the community this family lives. Her voice is auditory for the reader. The final sentence is actual showing, integrating action and dialogue. This paragraph from Tessa Hadley’s story “Because the Night” is even more visual, just about every told sentence a variation of showing: Kristen wore the gauzy, flowery, frilly Ossie Clark her mother had been married in, pulled up above her Brownie belt so she didn’t trip on it; Tom would be in his soldier suit, red jacket unbuttoned, his pistol in its holster slung low on his hip. Their gym daps gave them extra silence and speed. Kneeling among the baked-dry leaves on the stone floor of the greenhouse with the well, they made plans. If the weather had been fine, the glass panes would hold in their pocket of heat long into the evening, pungent with the green smell of tomato stalks, even though no tomatoes ever grew in there anymore—only fleshy, tall weeds that spurted up wherever the rain leaked in, then died and parched to ghosts in the dry spells. The greenhouses were built of brick to about waist height; an aisle ran between raised beds of dry earth and shelves of empty flowerpots. The first two sentences describe what the children are wearing, the third telling about their sport shoes. The next describes their placement on the greenhouse floor. What follows integrates showing of the greenhouse with details of its history, action verbs like “spurted,” “leaked,” “deaded,” and “parched.” Only the final sentence is pure telling. Clearly, the Groff and Hadley paragraphs don’t merely relate information in a series of dry factual sententence. They bring the information to life by animating it through visual details, evocation of emotional responses, sensory allusions, vivid verbs, and the rhythms of the writing.
  24. Why aren’t more of you watching Warrior?! It’s a question that keeps me up at night, along with “what is dark matter?” and “is a hot dog a sandwich?” Warrior is everything you could want in a TV show. From the stellar cast to the vivid setting to the breakneck action, it is a perfectly bingeable roller coaster of drama and excitement. For a show centered around martial arts, maybe it’s appropriate then, that Warrior has twice now been knocked down, gotten up, spit some teeth, and gotten back in the fight. It premiered on Cinemax in 2019, but after two seasons, it was dropped. Max picked it up for the third season, which premiered in August of last year—but then they pulled the plug, too. Now all three seasons are on Netflix… but a fourth season is not guaranteed. And I need a fourth season! I won’t spoil what happens at the end of the third season but, bonds have been broken, characters are in peril. It’s a lot. I’m here to make my case that you should watch it. Yes, this is a purely selfish endeavor. I am good with that. Warrior is set during a pivotal moment in American history; the post-Civil War railroad era. It focuses more specifically on the Tong Wars in 1870s San Francisco. Chinese gangs are fighting over turf, drugs, brothels, and money, while the country is flooded with Chinese immigrants willing to work for cheap. The business community loves this, of course, because they live to exploit workers if it means saving a few bucks. This generates conflicts with the Irish working class, many of whom are suddenly out of work. It’s a racial powder keg, which the police force—also mostly Irish—struggles to keep a lid on. Meanwhile, various politicians are running various games to try and turn all this conflict to their advantage. The story focuses on Ah Sahm, a gifted martial artist who arrives from China looking for his sister, Mai Ling. Shortly after arriving (and slapping around some sadistic immigration officials), he’s sold to one of Chinatown’s most powerful Tongs, the Hop Wei. And he soon learns that Mai Ling is a leader of that gang’s biggest rival, the Long Zii. Oh, and Mai Ling is not happy to be found. Turns out there’s some bad blood between the two, which is not helped along by the sudden conflict in their allegiances. This is a full-on kung-fu Western, based on an idea developed by Bruce Lee. As the story goes, while he was unsuccessful in pitching it, Warner Brothers just happened to come up with a show soon after, called Kung Fu and starring American actor David Carradine—about a Shaolin monk traveling the American west looking for his brother. Funny how Hollywood works… Anyway. Warrior is filled with with cool period costume and fictionalized versions of real-life figures, but it also does that great thing historical crime dramas can do: it shows us the bedrock on which some of today’s most divisive social issues were built (anti-Asian and anti-immigrant sentiment)—while reminding us how goddamn silly we are, that these things are still issues. It’s got the politics and intrigue of Game of Thrones, just fewer dragons and way better fight scenes. I grew up on kung fu movies and I can tell you with supreme confidence, this show is legit. The directors, along with fight choreographer Brett Chan, understand the importance of shooting wide and minimizing the use of cuts, allowing the natural talent of the performer to shine in the course of delivering kinetic, brutal action. It’s helped along even further by a killer cast. Andrew Koji plays Ah Sahm, with a megawatt smile and an easy charm, channeling some serious Bruce Lee energy. As deadly as he can be in a fight, Dianne Doan as Mai Ling is brilliant and calculating—and therefore, just as dangerous. Ah Sahm’s chief rival, Li Yong, is played by Indonesian martial artist Joe Taslim, from The Raid and The Night Comes for Us. Mark Dacascos (Brotherhood of the Wolf, Iron Chef) also shows up in the third season, which, to me, is very exciting. There isn’t a clunker in the ensemble, which runs deep, making it an incredible showcase for Asian actors. But the Irish side is just as compelling. Kieran Bew plays Bill O’Hara, the beleaguered head of the Chinatown squad, whose gambling debts often put him in conflict with both sides. And the show’s best villain has to be Dean Jagger, playing Dylan Leary, a labor unionist who rallies for the Irish workers, and gets into bareknuckle street fights for fun. He is despicable as he is charming. I could do this all day, but one more special shoutout goes to Olivia Cheng as Ah Toy, who heads the local brothel, and is based on a real-life Chinatown madam. The women who work for her do so of their own free will—and at night she sneaks around Chinatown with a dao sword, freeing enslaved sex workers and avenging people within the community. Speaking of Ah Toy, I get that historical shows can sometimes feel a little problematic. Yes, these are periods wherein social and sexual politics were not exactly polite, and female characters can often suffer in these contexts. I will say that while Warrior is certainly brutal and a show of its time, it treats women with dignity and agency, giving them plenty of room for complex storylines and kickass action. The show even introduces queer characters; besides Ah Toy, there’s Hong, portrayed by Chen Tang. He is briefly ridiculed for being homosexual by other members of the Hop Wei—before Ah Sahm and his best friend Young Jun (Jason Tobin) step in to defend him, recognizing his skill and loyalty as more important than his sexuality. I’m not going to say the show is completely free of cringe-inducing violence, but it definitely feels a lot less squidgy and tone-deaf than the average period drama. One of the show’s more interesting style choices is how they handle the language barriers. Both Ah Sahm and Mai Ling learned English as children in China, but many of the other Chinese characters aren’t fluent. In some scenes, when they’re interacting with white actors, they’ll speak stilted English-as-a-second-language—until they’re along together, in which they speak in fluent English. It’s an effective tool for communicating with the audience, often heightening the drama about who can understand what. But it also cuts down on the subtitles, and while I’m a fan of them (I’ll always take dialogue in a native language over a bad dub), I know they’re not for everyone. The point is: Warrior is awesome. The storylines are compelling and complex. When you dig into them, you find a show about blood family, chosen family, loyalty, racial politics, sexual politics, politics politics, and America’s questionable and shameful histories with… a whole lot of things. Then you get an entire episode devoted to an all-out war between the Irish and the Chinese on the streets of Chinatown. You get to learn stuff and have fun. Now it’s on Netflix. I am telling you with full confidence that it is worth watching. Give it a try. Best case scenario: you find a good way to kill a weekend. Better case scenario: the little-show-that-could picks itself up from the mat, bloodied and beaten, ready to go for a fourth season—and I get to find out what the hell happens after the bond-and-bone shattering events of the third season finale. View the full article
  25. Lilith was an incredibly difficult novel to write. I lived with it in my head, and worked on it on and off, for nearly a decade. September 2, 2015, the first morning I dropped my daughter off at pre-K, was one of joy and pride, until I saw the sign by the entrance that read, if blue or red lights are flashing do not enter— and when I tried to open the door, I found it was locked and the kids and parents had to be buzzed in. We live in a small Vermont town. We all know each other. Why did we need to be buzzed in as if entering the Pentagon? Why was there this menacing sign? The joy quickly turned to fear and anxiety, and anger as I realized what that sign and those locked doors meant: The place that was supposed to be a haven of safety and learning and community and growing and bonding—and that had been so for the first two-hundred-plus years after this country’s founding—had become a common place of death and slaughter of our children and their educators. Within days of that first drop-off, I learned that the school practiced scheduled “Lockdown Days” during which they prepared for that nightmare scenario, practiced for the day a gunman entered and killed as many kids as possible. A nightmare that should never happen even once. Ever. Not ever. Yet, in the past two decades, it happens again and again and again and again. In the eight years since that first day of pre-K, the violence has grown exponentially worse. We all know this. We all live it. When I finished edits on Lilith last March 28, 2023, our country was one day removed from the Nashville Covenant School shooting. More children dead. More educators. And in the year since, there have been a hundred more mass shootings, in schools, workplaces, stores, places of worship. An entire town in Maine was locked down for days because of a man with a gun. Was he mentally ill? Perhaps. If so, red flags would have prevented him from buying the gun he used. But these shooting are not mental health issues. Why do I believe this? Because every single one of our school shootings was committed by a male. Every. Single. One. Women are as subject to mental illness as men. They have equal access to firearms as men. But not one single female has entered a school and killed are children. This is a man issue. A male issue. As much as it is a gun issue. It feeds into and spawns from the American male’s obsession with and myth making of guns and equating guns and violence with some sort of epitome of strength and manhood and right. It is males killing our children in our schools and it is males on Capitol Hill who block any real protection they might afford our kids form gun violence, all for the sake of their contrived view of the 2nd amendment. What happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? I believe that that there are many men who hide behind the 2nd Amendment; they use their absolutist take on their “right to guns” behind their real belief which is their “right to violence.” What are guns if not the symbol of violence and death? But what about the rest of us? How did we arrive here? What has happened to us as a people, as a country, as a civilization, as a society, that are daily being forced to accept this as normal. Made to suffer the slaughter of our children and our neighbors in places where we ought to be safe? What have we become, and perhaps worse, what are we becoming? Where does this all lead? Where does it stop? Does it ever stop? Who will lead us, truly, truly lead us? What has to be done to stop it so our kids, and all of us, are safe from mass slaughter? For years, I thought I could not write this book the way it needed to be written. I did not know how to write it. I tried. I tried it from many angles and from many points of view. It seemed somehow a topic that could not be broached, perhaps should not be broached, a topic I feared I could not handle. Yet it kept coming back, this feeling I have, and I know so many of us have, of rage and futility and pain, every time it happens again. Enough, we say. Enough. Yet it never ends. Finally, I sat and wrote it in first person. I wrote it from the very place where these emotions, the helplessness and futility and rage, reside inside me. I wrote it as a parent of two young children who go to school every day, to a place we all know might not be safe, a place they might not come back from but should, always. I wrote it as an author, a human being, who knows that something is torn in our society, that something has gone terribly wrong for us to have ended up here. I wrote it as a man and a gun owner who believes in banning AR-15s that are designed and made only to kill human beings. I want to see permits, waiting periods, mental health red flags, guns taken from those convicted of domestic abuse, safe storage laws, mandatory trigger locks on guns stored at home, and more. As a man I am around other gun owners in private, and I know there is something broken in many, certain men, something that goes far back in time with the systems they create, the mythologies they push, the insecurities they hide and let bubble up in anger, and the places from which they draw what they see as strength. They are ugly, ugly places. I wrote Lilith, most of all, as a parent daring to ask myself, What would I do, what might someone do, one day when enough really is enough? When a parent, when a mother, finally cannot tolerate the slaughter of our kids any longer? My challenge was to handle the subject matter with a necessary sensitivity while at the same time be unsparing in my look at violence and the myth of violence and of men in our society. For it is always men who commit school shootings. This is stone cold fact. Not one female has ever been a school shooter. Not one. So, from this we can extrapolate that the mental health issue argument is a straw man. Mental health affects both men and women nearly equally, and women have equal access to guns as men, so why has no mentally ill woman ever committed one of the hundreds of school shootings, and fewer than 2% of all mass shootings? It is a gun problem, and a man problem. For some readers, it might be difficult to read. There is violence here. A violence we can barely speak of, cannot understand or make sense of. There is the despair we feel when nothing gets done to help stop it and there seems no end in sight. But there is also, I hope, love here, a love for our children, and a desire for change. I can’t speak for anyone save myself, but as a writer, I needed to, I absolutely had to, take a long, hard, honest look at why we might be where we are. I needed to imagine one character’s attempt— a woman, a mother, an educator—to use the very violence men have forever forced upon women to change the course of things, to claim some agency—rightly or wrongly—not knowing if her actions would bring change for the better or for the worse. *** View the full article
  26. In the theatre, plays used to be divided into comedy and tragedy. Historically, however, comedies weren’t necessarily funny—instead, to quote Oscar Wilde, ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means’. This definition of comedy has faded into the past, but it’s useful to return to when unpicking why comic fiction has come to be contrasted not with tragedy or drama, but with ‘serious’ works. This would be fine if by ‘serious’ we meant sincere, solemn or earnest. But all too often ‘serious’ is understood to denote fiction that is substantial, thoughtful, demanding and meriting deep consideration – with the implication that, by contrast, comic fiction is lightweight, simplistic, shallow and unworthy of a second thought. Trying to find alternate language in a recent interview with the brilliant Mindy Carlson, we were both struck by the fact that there is no alternative established vocabulary, which helps to explain why comic fiction is so often devalued as unserious. Comic books are far less likely to make award lists, unless the award is specifically for funny fiction. Still, most comedies have some moments of drama, while most dramas have at least the odd comic moment. Stories with the same emotional ‘tone’ and valence all the way through become boring – our empathy receptors overload, like the receptors in our eyes when we stare at something bright for too long. It’s the move between emotions that keeps stories ticking over for pace, excitement and, above all, our ability to vicariously feel every beat. Creative writing tutors talk about giving readers some relief or breathing space in thrillers by introducing a comic note or odd lighter scene, but it’s more than that. The laughter makes us feel the sadness all the more by contrast. It’s also truer to how humans work. We use humor— often black humor—to cope in moments of such pain that we feel in danger of shattering. But while Comedy-Drama is big business in TV and Film world, it’s relatively rare in fiction, where most books sit firmly in one or other camp, albeit with a little seasoning of the emotions from the other palette. Creating a true combination is a challenge both in terms of how the dip between emotional tones will be achieved without breaking the reader out of the story, and in terms of the moral complexities of laughing at serious matters, especially if those issues are trivialised by making the laugh the priority. This is why The Best Way to Bury Your Husband has an implausible ‘what if’ as its jumping off point—it frees readers to laugh unproblematically because the premise would never happen in the real world. Conversely, four women being killed by abusive (ex)partners in a small geographic area within a single fortnight is merely unlikely. This is what the book’s humor hinges on: the implausible ‘what if’ makes it satire, but the fact that the opposite would be realism allows the book to talk about male violence against women and girls from a palatable distance. By promising laughter as well as sadness, I hope readers will have a good time while also engaging with a very difficult topic. This balancing act is anything but simple, which helps to explain why true comedy-dramas are relatively rare, though those that succeed often lodge in the reader’s heart and mind forever. Here are some of my favorite recent and long-term examples. Holly Bourne, Girl Friends Bourne has a gift for lurching the reader from comedy to tragedy, deftly ripping away the funny surface-level of a scene to reveal the much darker, truer issues beneath. Her work is particularly powerful when highlighting the ways that misogyny shapes our world in ways we don’t even realize until something punctures our view. Suddenly, instead of ‘just joking’, we see harassment, and instead of ‘you’re over-reacting’, we see gaslighting, and instead of ‘you know I hate it when you…’, we see coercive control. Her latest YA novel You Could Be So Pretty, and her latest adult novel Girl Friends, show us the lies we tell ourselves as individuals and as a society. Critically, as well as authentic, hard-hitting moments there are plenty of genuine laughs. Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Both the epistolary novel, written by Shaffer but completed by Barrows after Shaffer’s illness and subsequent death, and the tender film adaptation, sit firmly in the comedy-drama arena. Neither shies away from misery of grief and the multiple traumas of war—or the bitter sacrifices that so many made to resist and thwart the Nazis. The book manages to balance truth and warmth without schmaltz. With pain and hope, it’s that rare thing—a truly heartwarming book with no sickly aftertaste. Maz Evans, Over My Dead Body First Miriam Price discovers she’s dead. Then she’s told that, because she died by misadventure, she’ll have to wait until she would have died of old age to move into her new afterlife home. Not prepared to hang around in the afterlife’s lobby for fifty years, she recruits her octogenarian former neighbor to prove that she was murdered. One slight hitch—her neighbor can only see Miriam because she’s due to die in the next few days. A madcap investigation follows, but under the surface there are real questions about love and, above all, the fact that it’s never too late to change and live the best life we can for whatever time we have left. Frances Hardinge, The Unraveller Hardinge’s work is often categorised as Middle Grade or Young Adult, but has at least as many adult readers—the very best children’s books aren’t just for children but for everyone. Inventive, weird, often macabre, and always interesting, surprising and funny, Hardinge’s stories rest on characters who challenge as well as engage. This is a critical element of comedy-drama—these elements are often combined precisely in order to examine moral complexities. In The Unraveller, Hardinge explores anger—how it can empower us, but also how, when that happens, we must choose to use our newly-achieved power responsibly. Diane Wynne Jones, Charmed Life Hardinge sits in a similar place in the market to national treasure Diana Wynne Jones. Although most famous for Howl’s Moving Castle, many readers agree Charmed Life deserves equal acclaim. When Cat Chant’s parents die in a riverboat accident, he’s left with no one but his elder sister ‘to cling to’. Underneath the hilarious fantasy-adventure is a serious look at the challenges children face when the only people they have to cling to care solely about their own best interests and are willing to do anything—including coercing others into terrible acts—to get what they want. Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I & Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader Although primarily comedies, this pair of books earns its place on a list about comedy-drama through the use of satire to provide a fresh lens through which to critique the monarchy and British class system. Both offer a hilarious and entirely implausible ‘what if’ opening gambit, enticing us into reconsidering the world we live in. In Townsend’s tale, the Queen wakes one day to find the monarchy has been abolished: soon the whole family is forcibly moved into council accommodation and have to learn how to live as ‘commoners’. In Bennett’s story, the Queen becomes such a voracious and passionate reader, something has got to give—her love of books or her constitutional duties and roles. Georgette Heyer, Frederica Other books that tip to the comedy end of the spectrum, but have depth and drama humming under the surface include many of Georgette Heyer’s historical novels. Like many of her works, Frederica hinges on the protagonist coming to be responsible for younger siblings—a situation Heyer found herself in when her father died in her early twenties. Similarly, in Jesse Sutanto’s Dial A for Aunties the real heart of the story revolves around the complexities of the fact that we all change and so no family stays static, which is complicated enough without the added challenges that immigrant families face in navigating multiple cultures, languages and being geographically dispersed. In Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, starting with One for the Money, the heroine hasn’t found her niche in life but is determined that her career will offer challenge and excitement. However, becoming a bounty hunter comes with much more darkness than she anticipated. Evanovich makes some surprising but effective choices regarding when to refuse to pull her punches for the sake of comedy in order to expose what violence does to people in the short- and long-term. For those looking for non-fiction that combines comedy and drama, try Ursula K Le Guin’s essay-collection-meets-memoir No Time to Spare. For films, try Keeping Mum, Shirley Valentine or Avanti. For a combination of image and text, try feminist cartoonist extraordinaire, Jackie Fleming. What are your favorite comedy-dramas? *** View the full article
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  28. Spring is here, and like the beautiful blossoms that lead to an explosion of pollen-induced sneezes, these novels examine the juxtaposition of attractive exteriors and invisible irritants (This metaphor especially works for the list below because one of the books is set in the DC area as the cherry trees are at peak bloom). I guess what I’m saying is, I’ve been sneezing a lot…And also, there’s some great thrillers out this month! Aggie Blum Thompson, Such a Lovely Family (Forge) It’s springtime in DC, the cherry trees are in full bloom, and a garden party is about to become a crime scene. I will partially admit to reading this because I have beloved relatives in Bethesda and thus can picture both the cherry trees and the McMansion monstrosities, but beyond the author’s excellent use of setting, this is also a delightfully twisty domestic thriller with nearly as many suspects as there are characters. Such a Lovely Family will keep you turning pages well into the night, and waking up the next day feeling rather appreciative of your family’s disinterest in hydrangeas. If your family does have hydrangeas, well, then I don’t know what to tell you. Avoid garden parties? Tammy Greenwood, The Still Point (Kensington) In this insider’s look at the cutthroat world of ballet moms, Tammy Greenwood explores what happens when a wild card instructor takes over a tight-knit ballet academy and pits the girls against each other for a chance at a life-changing scholarship. Greenwood uses the classic image of a dancer’s feet to great effect as her leitmotif: beautiful, poised, perfect clad in tights and pointe shoes; gnarled and wounded underneath. Tamron Hall, Watch Where They Hide (William Morrow) Tamron Hall’s new series featuring her alter ego, the investigative journalist Jordan Manning, gets a new installment! Hall’s heroine is a compelling sleuth, ready to spur those around her from indifference to action. In Watch Where They Hide, Hall uses the thriller as a way to discuss relationship abuse and institutional indifference: Manning is on a quest to find a missing mother with a dangerous ex after the police refuse to view the disappearance as foul play. Lisa Unger, The New Couple in 5B (Park Row) A mystery-thriller set in a grand NYC apartment building that might have a history of dark secrets and murder, where two unsuspecting inheritors have just moved into the kind of unit they’d never dreamed they could have? Lisa Unger, you have my attention. And are you by any chance also a realtor? –OR Abigail Dean, Day One (Viking) From the author of Girl A comes a new and prescient thriller about a school shooting in an idyllic English town and the conspiracy theories that soon proliferate. Dean has picked a tough topic, but one I predict she’ll explore with sensitivity and grace. Rene Denfield, Sleeping Giants (Harper) Rene Denfield writes the stories of wounded children and the adults who try their best to help them, even when this is an impossible task. In Sleeping Giants, a grieving retired cop decides to help a young woman find out what happened to her brother, dead at 9 after running away from a boy’s home and drowning in the ocean. The narrative is split between the contemporary investigation and flashbacks to the cruelties inflicted on the home’s young residents. Denfield writes a clear condemnation of the therapeutic tactics of “holding time,” and Sleeping Giants is a powerful condemnation of those who see themselves as helping even as they are hurting. View the full article
  29. Over the course of seventeen Jack Taylor novels, Ken Bruen’s most celebrated creation has endured the following (small sample size, too): extreme hangovers, numerous beatings, the deaths of close friends, and those not so close, numerous children, including his own, and myriad other injuries and humiliations. He’s also “dispatched” more evil individuals than any crime fighter could fathom. When we meet Jack in Galway Confidential, he’s been in a coma for nearly two years and still has a way to go to recover from the vicious stabbing that nearly ended his life. There’s also a strange man named Raftery at his side, who’s been hanging around Jack’s hospital room, and claims to the staff that he’s Jack’s brother. Jack finally has the wherewithal to, uh, inquire, who are you? Raftery tells Jack that he saw him being stabbed and rescued him from certain death. That’s good enough for Jack and, his savior becomes a new close companion. Soon, Jack is out of the hospital and taking on anther string of crimes. Nuns are being brutally attacked in Galway, and Sheila Winston, a former nun who was close with a dear friend of Jack’s, Sister Maeve, who was killed in Galway Girl, comes to Jack and asks him to help find who is behind them. “Go to the Guards,” Jack tells her. “I’ve been,” she replies, “but they are nigh overwhelmed with the demonstrations against the lockdowns and, too, assaults from the anti-vaxxers.” So, Jack, still not fully recovered, agrees to see what he can find out. Set in the immediate aftermath of the worst of the pandemic, Galway Confidential explores in detail (as do the other books in the series) the unique complexity of Irish society, with its deeply infused blend of the Church, a roller-coaster economy and a propensity for violence, particularly involving knives…and in these stories, those knives aren’t just sharp, they’re serrated, too. There’s another “Jack” who also resides in the loner, action realm: Lee Child’s iconic Jack Reacher. On the surface, these two one-man purveyors of essentially vigilante justice would seem quite similar. I asked Bruen, over email, aren’t they basically the same character? After all, each one has a moral code that compels them to take on injustice, albeit, Reacher being more of a quintessential loner compared Taylor, who has a rather more collaborative approach. Says Bruen, “For starters, Reacher is pretty much a hero, Taylor not so much. Reacher doesn’t read, Taylor does and voraciously. Reacher has an astounding success rate with women and Taylor is a complete disaster.” It’s also true that Reacher doesn’t suffer injury to the extent that Taylor does. In fact, Taylor is a regular Christ figure, who has numerous resurrections from his extensive physical traumas. Why so much pain? So many injuries? “Regarding Taylor’s injuries, I want to explore how much punishment a body can take.” And the level of violence Taylor faces in Galway? “The series has become more violent as the city around me becomes so. Knife attacks are a daily occurrence and the clergy have been targeted on many streets.” The Taylor series feels particularly moored to Bruen’s own personality. There’s a distinct sense of a symbiotic approach to life between the two. Or is this reader just projecting? “My own love of books and a short temper helped form the character of Taylor,” responds Bruen. “Jack was brought up in dire poverty, this is a base of his seething anger. I based Jack on my brother who died a homeless alcoholic in the Australian outback. I wanted to write about the Irish obsession with drink and the terrible outcome. Books, like myself are and have been the salvation of Jack.” Several thematic affectations ebb and flow through the series. Jack Taylor may be a coke-snorting “J” (Jameson) whiskey drinker and an overall self-abuser, but the man is literate as hell. The Taylor novels are rich with poetry, crime fiction, musical references and philosophical musings. Bruen, who has a PhD in Metaphysics is as noted above, a voracious reader (and lover of music as well). He repeatedly alludes to several literary figures, notably among them the poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. “I am fascinated by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and that The Wreck of The Deutschland had the drowning of all those nuns. Nuns are a prominent feature of Jack’s life, mostly against his will.” From The Wreck of The Deutschland: Sister, a sister calling A master, her master and mine!— And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling; The rash smart sloggering brine Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one; Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine Ears, and the call of the tall nun To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm’s brawling Another reoccurring theme in Jack’s life are the “sidekick” sub-protagonists who enter his orbit. These men serve as dark to Jack’s light. In Galway Confidential, it’s the strangely ubiquitous Raftery. It reveals little to say that their relationship does not end well. Bruen notes, “It has been my experience that instant friendships should carry a health warning. Jack takes people at face value and lives to regret it. It has been said that alcoholics continually make new friends as they blow through so many. Jack has the neon sign over his head that says, ‘Dodgy folk assemble here’. Jack works on the basis of ‘Keep your enemies close but your friends closer’ The many betrayals he endures is part of his genetic makeup, [and] the history of Ireland is littered with betrayal. Jack doesn’t probe new friendships too closely but relies on the notion, ‘This is a good drinking buddy’, Known here as ‘The Guinness theory.’ Much like most of Galway folklore, it is based on ‘Will you come for a pint. ‘That’s the best I can explain it.” And what about the “mother issues” we see in many Irish stories? Frequently they are bitter, repressed and lacking emotional empathy. Or so it seems. In one scene, Jack and Raftery are having a cup of coffee, and Raftery “…slurps his coffee, few sounds as irritating; he caught the look on my face. What’s eating you, bro? Bro! I sighed. I come from a long line of sighers. My mother, the bad bitch, could have sighed for Ireland. Irish men are supposed to love their mammies. Phew-oh. Not me, not ever. She was the walking shape of pure malignancy, and pious to boot.” Bruen acknowledges, “For a long time, Irish mothers were of the Quiet Man variety, sweet and funny. I wanted the opposite. Religion ground them down. The church no longer has this power.” Yet if Jack is tethered to anything, it’s that Church, those nuns. As he investigates, the murders and beatings of nuns, he meets with the “boss,” the Mother Superior, but more importantly, another encounter late in the story with Sheila Winston: Jack tells her he’s figured out who is behind the current spate of killings. She says, “There’s one thing to do now.” Jack thinks, “I was about to lay out about how going to the Guards was a waste of time without evidence, but before I could start my lame litany, she said, ‘You are going to kill him.’ “Nuns are a prominent feature of Jack’s life,” Bruen says. “Mostly against his will. With the Mother Superior, I wanted to paint a colourful feisty woman who is determined to save Jack and to show how much in the human condition nuns are, to break through the almost fearful mystique in which they are seen.” Although a far cry from the previous century, the Church still pulls, perhaps just with more subtlety. And then there was Covid. It’s been over three and a half years since the previous Jack Taylor, Galway Girl. As with most of the planet, the pandemic walloped Ireland and, not just a little. Ken Bruen: “Covid hit hard. I had health problems of a different kind and was knocked out for about two years, I wanted to explore this new landscape of separation, masks, panic, fear, dread. A new kind of isolation emerged and even after Covid, many people had a fear of venturing out. For the first time in forty years, I didn’t have a book published. That was an alien landscape. I’m still maneuvering.” During this period, Bruen actually did publish a novel, Callous, a standalone (with the occasional reference to old Jack). Callous is a play on words for the name of a woman named Kate Mitchell, a mostly recovering junkie who inherits her aunt’s seaside cottage. What she doesn’t know is that her aunt was murdered by a member of a Zeta gang headed by crazed dealer named Diogenes Ortiz, or Dio, for short, who with his enforcer, Keegan, are “procuring” houses near a body of water for meth labs. A little murder is sometimes necessary to procure said houses and Kate’s aunt had to go. Keegan, “… had a total, almost psychotic, devotion to his boss. Dio had rescued him from a hellhole of a prison cell in Nogales.” Unfortunately for Kate, she looks like the wrong person. “[His] only concern regarding Dio was the lunatic fixation Dio had for Maria Callas, and now Kate Mitchell. Something in the whole scenario spoke to him of weakness.” Callous is typically brutal and gory, but several so Bruen touches make the story funny at times. When one of Kate’s troubled brothers who have come to help her ward off the Zeta boys, is shot nearly point blank and thought to be dead, he ends up in the ICU instead. What saved his life? In his jacket was a copy of…the Bible. The poet Hopkins has a cameo reference and a particularly vicious death occurs when a Rosary is used to stab an eye of one of the numerous victims in the story. Bruen merely states, “I wrote Callous as a short blunt shot between Jack Taylor books.” Where do Bruen’s (wonderful) barrage of literary quotes, song references, and so forth come from? He recalls seeing the American roots singer-songwriter Iris Dement, who “…did a gig in Galway and I was among the handful of people there, she gave a haunting rendition of ‘No Time to Cry’ I have as my mantra, her line ‘Bite down and swallow hard.’ It is when I am writing a particular piece and bingo, one of those quotes leaps in my mind and I want to share that.” And the PhD. in Metaphysics? “I studied Metaphysics for the most basic reason of all, I wanted to know, And to know what? That is still part of a longing I experience when I stand by the ocean.” To interview Ken Bruen is an utter delight. Besides providing thoughtful, revealing responses to one’s questions, unprompted gems are tossed out along for the ride. To wit: “A guy I know only recently discovered I write and said to me in all seriousness, ‘I thought you had no education.’ And “Few years back, An English professor, friend of mine said, ‘I need to pay my mortgage, I’m going to write one of them books you do’ I offered him a range of authors and he scoffed, ‘I don’t want to read that stuff, I just want to get the novel done’ Months later, I met him and dejected he was, muttered, ‘I keep lapsing into literature’ I pray daily that I don’t ever lapse such.” What’s a typical day in the life of Ken Bruen? “I don’t have typical days as some kick in the face usually arrives by first post. I do rise early to get my writing done, then it’s feed the swans, and turn to see what Galway has to throw. Always something off kilter… Evenings, I don’t guzzle Jameson as one critic suggested. Would I could. reminds me the English journalist who was horrified to find I was mannerly! She titled me as ‘A benign thug’ I’ll take that.” His wife: “For years, when my wife was asked what kind of books I wrote, she said’ ‘Stabbing types’ Succinct.” The art of theft: “The National Library of Ireland listed the books most ‘disappeared’ from the shelves and said Ken Bruen was the No. 1 author whose books were gone, nine titles in all. I finally got a No. 1 spot. The library here says I am the most stolen. There is a metaphor/ message here, I’m fucked if I know what it is.” Unsurprisingly, numerous Jack Taylor novels have been optioned for TV. (Not that you can see them in the US.) Bruen was happy: “There are 9 Jack Taylor books and I think the casting of Iain Glen was a smart move.” An additional series based on the 2014 novel, Merrick was written for Swedish TV and retitled 100 Code and is set in NYC. “Sending Noir to Sweden, that is sweet!” Also two films, one from a standalone, London Boulevard (2001) and one based on a different series, Brant and Roberts (cops) Blitz, (2002 starring Jason Statham. Bruen, effusively: “London Boulevard, the movie is I think very underrated, Bill Monaghan had a vision of it as a commentary on social celebrity and I think he didn’t get credit for how well the movie worked. Blitz was great, they really captured the humour and I got to play a priest! Blitz, on DVD was a massive hit. That’s the Jason Statham effect.” Galway Confidential is, in Bruen’s words, the “penultimate Jack Taylor novel.” Coming next, Galway DNA concludes the series. It’s already written. So? “I am working on a crime novel that I hope is a huge distance from previous work. I want it to be hard, fast and funny/ Change of font to emphasize how early I am on that.” Undoubtedly, it will be all those things, and more. This reader is ready now. *** For a deep – seriously deep – critical, very academic analysis of Bruen’s work in the context of other contemporary Irish crime writers, see the recently published book, Finders: Justice, Faith, and Identity in Irish Crime Fiction, by Anjili Babbar View the full article
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