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Novel Development From Concept to Query - Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Haste is a Writer's Second Worst Enemy, Hubris Being the First
AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect (AAC). This is a literary and novel development website dedicated to educating aspiring authors in all genres. A majority of the separate forum sites are non-commercial (i.e., no relation to courses or events) and they will provide you with the best and most comprehensive guidance available online. You might well ask, for starters, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new to AAC, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" forum. Peruse the novel development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide broken into three major sections.
In tandem, you will also benefit by perusing the review and development forums found below. Each one contains valuable content to guide you on a path to publication. Let AAC be your primary and tie-breaker source for realistic novel writing advice.
Your Primary and Tie-Breaking Source
For the record, our novel writing direction in all its forms derives not from the slapdash Internet dartboard (where you'll find a very poor ratio of good advice to bad), but solely from the time-tested works of great genre and literary authors as well as the advice of select professionals with proven track records. Click on "About Author Connect" to learn more about the mission, and on the AAC Development and Pitch Sitemap for a more detailed layout.
Btw, it's also advisable to learn from a "negative" by paying close attention to the forum that focuses on bad novel writing advice. Don't neglect. It's worth a close look, i.e, if you're truly serious about writing a good novel.
There are no great writers, only great rewriters.
Forums
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Novel Writing Courses and "Novel Writing on Edge" Work and Study Forums
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Novel Writing on Edge - Nuance, Bewares, Actual Results
Platitudes, entitled amateurism, popular delusions, and erroneous information are all conspicuously absent from this collection. From concept to query, the goal is to provide you, the aspiring author, with the skills and knowledge it takes to realistically compete in today's market. Just beware because we do have a sense of humor.
I've Just Landed So Where Do I go Now?
Labors, Sins, and Six Acts - NWOE Novel Writing Guide
Crucial Self-editing Techniques - No Hostages- 46
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Art and Life in Novel Writing
Misc pearls of utility plus takeaways on craft learned from books utilized in the AAC novel writing program including "Write Away" by Elizabeth George, "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner, "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass, and "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard:
The Perfect Query Letter
The Pub Board - Your Worst Enemy?
Eight Best Prep Steps Prior to Agent Query
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Bad Novel Writing Advice - Will it Never End?
The best "bad novel writing advice" articles culled from Novel Writing on Edge. The point isn't to axe grind, rather to warn writers about the many horrid and writer-crippling viruses that float about like asteroids of doom in the novel writing universe. All topics are unlocked and open for comment.
Margaret Atwood Said What?
Don't Outline the Novel?
Critique Criteria for Writer Groups- 23
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The Short and Long of It
Our veteran of ten thousand submissions, Walter Cummins, pens various essays and observations regarding the art of short fiction writing, as well as long fiction. Writer? Author? Editor? Walt has done it all. And worthy of note, he was the second person to ever place a literary journal on the Internet, and that was back in early 1996. We LOVE this guy!
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Quiet Hands, Unicorn Mech, Novel Writing Vid Reviews, and More
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Novel Writing Advice Videos - Who Has it Right?
Archived AAC reviews of informative, entertaining, and ridiculous novel writing videos found on Youtube. The mission here is to validate good advice while exposing terrible advice that withers under scrutiny. Members of the Algonkian Critics Film Board (ACFB) include Kara Bosshardt, Richard Hacker, Joseph Hall, Elise Kipness, Michael Neff, and Audrey Woods.
Stephen King's War on Plot
Writing a Hot Sex Scene
The "Secret" to Writing Award Winning Novels?- 91
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Writing With Quiet Hands
All manner of craft, market, and valuable agent tips from someone who has done it all: Paula Munier. We couldn't be happier she's chosen Algonkian Author Connect as a base from where she can share her experience and wisdom. We're also hoping for more doggie pics!
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Unicorn Mech Suit
Olivia's UMS is a place where SF and fantasy writers of all types can acquire inspiration, read a few fascinating articles, learn something useful, and perhaps even absorb an interview with one of the most popular aliens from the Orion east side.
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Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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Audrey's Archive - Reviews for Aspiring Authors
An archive of book reviews taken to the next level for the benefit of aspiring authors. This includes a unique novel-development analysis of contemporary novels by Algonkian Editor Audrey Woods. If you're in the early or middle stages of novel writing, you'll get a lot from this. We cannot thank her enough for this collection of literary dissection.
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New York Write to Pitch and Algonkian Writer Conferences 2024
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New York Write to Pitch 2023 and 2024
- New York Write to Pitch "First Pages" - 2022, 2023, 2024
- Algonkian and New York Write to Pitch Prep Forum
- New York Write to Pitch Conference Reviews
For New York Write to Pitch or Algonkian attendees or alums posting assignments related to their novel or nonfiction. Assignments include conflict levels, antagonist and protagonist sketches, plot lines, setting, and story premise. Publishers use this forum to obtain information before and after the conference event, therefore, writers should edit as necessary. Included are NY conference reviews, narrative critique sub-forums, and most importantly, the pre-event Novel Development Sitemap.
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Algonkian Writer Conferences - Events, FAQ, Contracts
Algonkian Writer Conferences nurture intimate, carefully managed environments conducive to practicing the skills and learning the knowledge necessary to approach the development and writing of a competitive commercial or literary novel. Learn more below.
Upcoming Events and Programs
Pre-event - Models, Pub Market, Etc.
Algonkian Conferences - Book Contracts
Algonkian Conferences - Ugly Reviews
Algonkian's Eight Prior Steps to Query
Why do Passionate Writers Fail?- 237
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Algonkian Novel Development and Writing Program
This novel development and writing program conducted online here at AAC was brainstormed by the faculty of Algonkian Writer Conferences and later tested by NYC publishing professionals for practical and time-sensitive utilization by genre writers (SF/F, YA, Mystery, Thriller, Historical, etc.) as well as upmarket literary writers. More Information
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Forum Statistics
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Algonkian Retreats and Workshops - Assignments 2024
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. -
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The Best Reviewed Books of the Month: March 2024
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 -
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When Horror Hits Home: An Appreciation of Domestic Horror
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 -
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When Good People Do Bad Things: Exploring Everyday Evil in Crime Fiction
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 -
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Y’all Means All: On the Growing Diversity of Southern Gothic and Rural Noir
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 -
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Robin Peguero on Satire and the Normalization of Political Violence
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 -
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How to turn Lunar New Year (and Other Holidays) Into a Setting for Your Next Crime
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 -
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On The Unbearable Ordinariness Of The Conspiracy Theorist
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 -
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Five Mysteries and Thrillers with a Reality TV Twist
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 -
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Algonkian Retreats and Workshops - Assignments 2024
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 -
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The Golden Age of the Paranoid Political Thriller
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 -
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Cozy Renegades: Novels that Push the Boundaries
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
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