A young theater critic is drawn into a dangerous game that blurs the lines between reality and performance. A gripping debut from the New York Times theater critic.
HERE IN THE DARK
by Alexis Soloski
Flatiron, December 2023
(via The Gernert Company)
Vivian Parry likes the dark. A former actress, she now works as the junior theater critic at a major Manhattan magazine. Her nights are spent beyond the lights, in a reserved seat, giving herself over to the shows she loves. By day, she savages them, with words sharper than a knife. Angling for a promotion, Vivian reluctantly agrees to give an interview in which the conversation, with a stranger who seems to know her work, reveals secrets she thought she had long since buried. When her interviewer disappears soon thereafter, she learns from his devastated fiancé that Vivian was the last person to have seen him alive. When the police refuse to investigate, Vivian assumes the role of amateur detective. . As she nears the final act of this investigative ruse, she finds that the boundaries between theater and the real world are more tenuous and more dangerous than even she could have believed. Gripping, propulsive, and shot through with menace and dark glamour, HERE IN THE DARK takes us behind the scenes of New York theater, lifting the curtain on the lies we tell ourselves and each other.
Alexis Soloski is a prize-winning New York Times theater critic and a former lead theater critic at the Village Voice. She has taught at Barnard College and at Columbia University, where she earned her PhD in Theater. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
“From its very first page to its final revelation, Here in the Dark will possess you with a mix of acerbic wit and Highsmithian invention. You’ll be thrilled by the ways Soloski takes the novel of suspense and turns it into a meditation on seeing and being seen, knowing and being known, judging and being judged. » —Isaac Butler, author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act
« A moody, taut dose of noir, Here in the Dark is a poised, daring debut—the kind of novel I relish and can’t get out of my head, evoking the work of icons like Megan Abbott and Margaret Millar in its hypnotic prose and mesmerizing characters. Readers will not forget Vivian Parry—and they won’t want to. » —Alex Segura, bestselling author of Secret Identity
“Hitchcock meets a slippery metatheatrics of power, performance, desire, and escape. This is a novel – and a protagonist – who moves with a precious velocity, constantly choosing the most dangerous move and bringing us careening after.” —Jen Silverman, author of We Play Ourselves
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