An effective one-sitting crime story with an existential bent.
A moody murder tale complicated by Covid-19 and other evidence of looming mortality.
Before he became a prolific novelist (The Dog Killer of Utica, 2014, etc.), Lentricchia was an academic scholar of postmodern literature. Fittingly, this melancholy novella reads like a Law & Order episode scripted by one of his favorite subjects, Don DeLillo. Eliot, a former private eye who’s figured in previous Lentricchia novels, arrives in New York with his longtime friend Antonio in March 2020 to sort out some family issues. They share a car into the city with their flight’s first officer, Gina, who’s the daughter of the airline’s CEO and niece of a notorious mobster. A couple of NYPD detectives draw Eliot and Antonio into the mob investigation, and much of the story involves untangling Gina’s involvement. But Lentricchia strives to avoid a familiar police-procedural story arc; the novel is girded with scenes of the aging friends killing time in Manhattan’s Yale Club, bantering about their failing septuagenarian bodies and busted relationships. (“Revenge-desire, kills on the inside. Heart destruction. High blood pressure. Eating binges. Look at your poundage. Forgive her.”) And as the coronavirus forces the city into lockdown, Topic A for everyone is fear of death. Elliot, coming off heart surgery, is skeptical about the virus (“It couldn’t have jumped over the entire continent in one leap and landed in New Rochelle. Is the Times that hysterical with fake news?”). One of the cops has to manage the mob case, his wife’s newfound aggressive cancer, and the murder of Gina's co-pilot. The novel is too brief to address any of these crises very deeply, but it successfully conjures up a city constricting upon itself and the feeling of asphyxiation it provokes in its characters.
An effective one-sitting crime story with an existential bent.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77183-675-3
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Guernica World Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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