What You See in the Dark - Hardcover

Manuel Muñoz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0715641654 ISBN 13: 9780715641651

Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Company, 2011

Synopsis

A tense literary thriller set against the backdrop of Hitchcock's 'Psycho'. Bakersfield, California in the late 1950s is a dusty, quiet town too far from Los Angeles to share that city's energy yet close enough to Hollywood to fill its citizens with the kind of dreams they discover in the darkness of the movie theatre. For Teresa, an aspiring singer working at a shoe store, dreams lie in the music of love and longing her mother shared with her. In Dan Watson, the most desirable young man in town, she thinks she has found someone to help realize her dreams. When a famous actress arrives from Hollywood with a great and already legendary director, local gossip about Teresa and Dan gives way to speculation about the celebrated visitors, there to work on what will become an iconic, groundbreaking film of madness and murder at a roadside motel. No one anticipates how the ill-fated love affair between Dan and Teresa will soon rival anything the director could ever put on the screen. This is a thoroughly original work within the great tradition of noir, captivating in its juxtapositions of tenderness and menace, violence and regret, played out in a town on the brink of change.

About this title

About the Author:

Manuel Munoz was born in 1972 and went to Harvard University. He has published two short story collections, and received a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, and the prestigious Whiting Writers' Award. Find him online at www.manuel-munoz.com.

From Booklist:

Muoz (The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, 2007) has hit upon a killer premise: the making of Psycho (with appearances by the actress and the director) set against the real-life murder of a young Latina singer in Bakersfield. The two stories come together in the beginning, when the actress and the director visit Bakersfield, scouting locations that could be used for the external shots of the Bates Motel. They find one, but the owner turns them down, miffed that the actress refused to acknowledge who she was earlier in the day, when she ate at the local diner. With that thin filament connecting the plots, Muoz expertly jumps from the making of the Hitchcock filmincluding, of course the shower scene, as experienced by the actressto the sad story of the small-town murder and the lives of the locals who were affected by the crime. Mood connects the two stories, that sense of melancholy foreboding that lurked behind so many 1950s noir films, and Muoz expertly evokes the way quiet desperation can explode into life-altering violence. --Bill Ott

About this edition

• Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0715641654
• ISBN 13: 9780715641651
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272