What You See in the Dark [Hardcover]

Manuel Munoz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 2011

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 kinds of dreams they discover in the darkness of the movie theater. For Teresa, a young, aspiring singer who works at a shoe store, dreams lie in the music her mother shared with her, plaintive songs of love and longing. In Dan Watson, the most desirable young man in Bakersfield, she believes she has found someone to help her realize those 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 thoroughly original work is intense and fascinating in its juxtapositions of tenderness and menace, violence and regret, played out in a town on the brink of change.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Muñoz, the author of two short story collections (The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue and Zigzagger), uses the second-person voice to draw the reader into his stellar first novel. In 1959, the Director (i.e., Alfred Hitchcock) arrives in Bakersfield, Calif., to film Psycho, along with the Actress (i.e., Janet Leigh), who's struggling to get a handle on the character she will portray. Providing counterpoint to the events surrounding the making of the iconic Hollywood film, including the search for a motel to serve as the exterior of the Bates Motel, is the story of locals Dan Watson and Teresa Garza, whose doomed love affair ends in murder. The author brilliantly presents the Actress's inner thoughts, while he handles the violence with a subtlety worthy of Hitchcock himself. The lyrical prose and sensitive portrayal of the crime's ripple effect in the small community elevate this far beyond the typical noir. 10-city author tour. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

Mu�oz (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, Mu�oz expertly jumps from the making of the Hitchcock film�including, of course the shower scene, as experienced by the actress�to 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 Mu�oz expertly evokes the way quiet desperation can explode into life-altering violence. --Bill Ott

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; First Edition edition (March 29, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565125339
• ISBN-13: 978-1565125339
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #990,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Hitchcockian March 26, 2011

By switterbug TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

What do you see in the dark? Well, that partly depends on your perspective. In Munoz's stylistic mise-en-scène novel, the second-person point of view frames the watchful eye and disguises the wary teller. Reading this story is like peering through Hitchcock's lens--the camera as observer's tool and observer as camera--with light and shadow and space concentrated and dispersed frame by frame, sentence by sentence.

Munoz applied the famous director's noir techniques to create a story about murder, madness, and longing amid the desire and antipathy of a working-class California town. Lives intersect, scenes juxtapose, and shades of gray color the landscape of the novel. Scenes of tenderness dovetail with acts of menace, plaintive music integrates with the rattling of chains, dark interiors annex the stark white heat of day.

In the hushed and dusty working-class town of Bakersfield, California, in the late 1950's, the locals jealously watch the fresh and guarded romance of Dan and Teresa. Dan is the rugged bartender/guitarist and sexy son of Arlene, a bitter waitress at the downtown café and the abandoned wife of a motel owner out on the changing Highway 99.

Teresa, a shoe saleswoman and aspiring singer, is the willowy Mexican-American daughter of a mother who left her to chase dreams of love in Texas. The narrow-minded prejudices of the town encroach upon the open bud of romance, and the ill-fated romance takes an ineluctable bloody turn. We know from the start that someone dies, but it is the why and how and where that sustains the tension of the story.

At the height of Dan and Teresa's love story, the glitter and fantasy of Hollywood comes to Bakersfield as the crew arrives to shoot select scenes of a revolutionary new film.... The unnamed Actress and Director reveal themselves implicitly through details of the unnamed film-in-progress. It was evident when they scouted exterior shots, and during an illustrious scene with the Actress.

The interior monologues of the Actress and the frame by frame shoot of that most renowned scene in movie history is worth the price of admission alone. It felt as if Munoz had been standing next to the Director. The author's interpretation of historical data are transposed with polished clarity into film as words, and the searing silences that Hitchcock is so famous for lands on the page in the spaces between passages.

There are superbly captured details and Hitchcockian motifs that add subtlety to the story and incite the reader's suspense, such as stairwells, keys, mothers, blondes, confined spaces, as well as loss of identity and optical symbols. The plate glass window of the café serves up a film frame metaphor (and the lens of a camera). Moral ambiguity, mirrors, bars and grills, and kisses, and of course--the MacGuffin, are all woven in with care and control.

My primary criticism is that the narrative is dry and cerebral, but this may not be an issue of concern with other readers. I was academically stimulated by the author's style and complexity of techniques, but occasionally it felt studied and detached. The muted coolness kept me at a distance; I wasn't emotionally engaged, but I was intellectually absorbed. The frequent jump-cuts were its strength, but also its drawback.

So what do you see in the dark? The eyes, said Hitchcock, the eyes said it all. Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Summer Reading 2011 Official Selection April 28, 2011

By Stylus

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is a well-balanced, highbrow, page-turner. It succeeds on the base mystery level--a dead body, several possible culprits, a few steamy scenes, etc. But it excels on a more cerebral, more aesthetic, level. It is a beautiful book, and it wrings that beauty from the smallest of details. It trains the mystery reader who scours the text for clues to look, in the same demanding way, for something more. That the prose pays off under such scrutiny is no mean feat.

It's rare to find a novel this well-paced. High literature that works within the conventions of more popular literature, this book draws more from Hitchcock than simply a character. Psycho, after all, is at one and the same time high art and sensational pap. The key is that Hitchcock made the art from the pap, not in tension against it. And that's Munoz's success as well: this book raises deep and complex emotions in the reader, and it does so not despite, but because it satisfies so well the basic human desire for story and sensation.

This is a must for summer reading lists this year. It is smart and plenty dark enough for the rainy day, but it is compelling and light on its feet enough for the beach as well.

One final note: you do not have to see Psycho in order to understand the novel. But for those who have, the book's vision of the film and its actress is a rare treat.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "The true complications of being in love show themselves in flashes." March 12, 2011

By Luan Gaines HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Munoz captures love, loss, violence and profound loneliness in 1950s Bakersfield, California, through the intimate characterization of three women in this beautifully rendered novel: the Actress (unnamed) and locals Arlene Watson and Teresa Garza. Teresa's is a fringe existence, her solitary occupancy of an apartment over the town bowling alley, a position in a shoe store, where she is only called from the back room when her fluency in Spanish is required, the hours before work she spends walking or peering into shop windows without the money to purchase what they offer, watched covertly by day workers, one in particular: "They knew her. They knew about her. They knew all about her." But when Dan Watson, Bakersfield's best catch, takes an interest in this young woman, Teresa's future suddenly rings with promise: "Maybe her own life could be an existence others could dream about."

Brad's mother, Arlene, spends her days waiting tables behind the plate glass window of a local diner, her evenings tending the roadside motel her husband left behind when he walked away from wife and son. An anomaly in this quiet city, the Actress arrives in a limo with plans to meet her Director, scouting this location for the ground-breaking film that will introduce a new kind of violence to American audiences, a stunning blend of madness and murder: "For hurt to matter, she thought, you had to be beautiful." Though the Actress is only passing through, she is critical to an intricate plot on a small town stage, a main street made irrelevant by a nearly-completed freeway, 1950s Bakersfield awakened from a long slumber by Munoz's elegant, fluid prose.... The author's mastery of character and image is vivid, yet hypnotic, despite moments of violence, from the lovers' first tentative exchanges, to Arlene's fit of temper with the Actress, the lovesick day worker, who leaves small gifts at Teresa's door and blood-stained clothes that tell a mother all she needs to know.

This is a world rich with nuance, as delicate as a serenade, intense as a tragic opera: Teresa's open window on an airless night, Ricky Nelson crooning from a bedside radio; Arlene Watson's recollection of a brother as insubstantial as memories of her marriage; meticulously orchestrated details as the Director films a deadly shower scene that will change the course of film history. Both genius and tragedy coexist in this novel, the shocking ending to a love story gone wrong, an iconic film, the temporarily-resurrected Bakersfield, a lonely woman hopelessly unable to embrace change or opportunity. Munoz steps quietly into the past, into particular moments as though examining tissue-wrapped artifacts, the passing hopes of women, the bloody aftermath of violence, a ballad sung by a dark-haired girl in a dark night club, small town America bypassed by progress, lost forever, save in black and white photos and the prose of Manuel Munoz. For those who have known such a time and place and that movie, this novel is an extraordinary gift. For the others, an experience to savor. Luan Gaines/2011. Read more ›

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I Love The Way This Guy Writes.. October 14, 2011

By R. Harris

Format:Hardcover

For me..it's HOW you tell a story that keeps me interested. The subject matter can be most anything...as long as
the writing keeps me reading. I expecially like a 'can't put it down' story or book, and What You See In The Dark, fit's that requirement, perfectly. The storyline is a grabber, and a mix of romance, suspense, done in a literary
style. I think the ending could have been better, but...that didn't 'mess up' the book in any way, for me.
Munoz is an espeically sensitive writer, and his nuances and details make the people come alive...and make you want
to read more of his writing. I loved this book. It had a very comfortable feel to it, every word is perfect for what he wants to say...and it gives me the feeling that Munoz, himself would be the same way. If you read the first page or two...you won't put it down. I can't wait for his next one.