Manuel Muñoz

Brooding, atmospheric, and with the feel of film noir threading its pages, Manuel Munoz's novel What You See in the Dark is unlike my normal reads, edging close to claustrophobia and hinting of menace. A multi-stranded narrative weaving the tale of a solitary, poor girl, Teresa, and her developing relationship with the town's golden boy, with the spare and unfulfilling, disappearing and seemingly irrelevant life of his mother Mrs. Watson, and the arrival in the town of Bakersfield of a show more famous Actress and Director (Janet Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock) as they start work on Psycho.

When the narrative focuses on Teresa and Dan, the narration is addressed to the reader as if s/he is a woman in the town whose jealousy over the developing relationship remains palpable even as she pursues her own boyfriend giving that thread of the novel a slightly prurient feel and keeping the reader distant from both Teresa and Dan themselves as characters.

The narration of Arlene Watson's portion of the novel focuses on her feelings, her past and the way in which life has passed her by, leaving her invisible and unable to grasp life and accept the future. There is a resigned inevitability to her character and to her life that bows her head and weighs down her shoulders, manifesting in the story of her abandonment by her husband and in the way in which she cannot see that the motel she owns is going to be obsolete, lonely, and as empty as her bitter life once the new freeway bypasses it.

The portions of the novel concentrating on the Actress and Director take their lead from the reality of movie making. There are technical bits, concerns over character motivation, and the delicate work of creating realistic artifice. The Actress wonders about her role and the trajectory of her career. The Director, exacting and controlled, looks to create art, pushing the boundaries of reality in film only to come up short against these exponentially expanded boundaries in the future.

As all three of the parallel stories wind together, there is a terrifying inevitability and a hopelessness that pervades the novel and the shocking act of violence at its core is neither unexpected nor anticipated. The writing is visually rich and symbolic. Munoz keeps a steady tension throughout the novel, slowly pulling back the shower curtain to show the blood mixing with water and swirling down the drain, disappearing. Quietly desperate and terrible, this forbidding and complex novel tapers off in the end neither embracing the change coming nor eschewing it. show less

Manuel Munoz's novel has the feel of film noir, from the classic story of girl with dreams meets boy and things go horribly wrong, to the fading Hollywood actress sent to film a handful of scenes for a new movie in Bakersfield, California. There's a crime here, but no mystery, unless it lays in the buried dreams and motivations of the residents and migrant workers.

This was a beautifully written book, with as vivid a setting as could be hoped for. Set fifty years ago, in an agricultural town show more dependent on migrant labor, there'e a wonderfully nuanced cast of characters, from the girl, Teresa, who lives in a room above the bowling alley, and who is a little lonely and a little hopeful, to her boyfriend's mother, whose income depends on a motel on the road into town, a motel that will be bypassed by the interstate being built a few miles away, to the actress, who wonders if this next film will mark the end of her career and whether she cares.

I'll be looking for Munoz's short stories and I'm looking forward to seeing what he writes next. show less

The Consequences: Stories was published in the UK in October 2022 by the small, but perfectly formed, Indigo Press. Extremely well reviewed in the US, Muñoz’s collection of short stories concerns Mexican American lives in southern California with their true families south of the border, or Mexicans crossing the border to find work in the US. This is a hard world; the circumstances are usually uncomfortable and the characters resilient, defensive, and put upon. The stories are on the harsh show more side but very real - California and the south west is certainly not all Palm Springs and Beverly Hills. Muñoz is the first in his family to attend university and he wears his Harvard education lightly with his writing, however the awards that the individual stories have collected along their journey into this admirable but gritty collection reveal a considerable talent. show less

This is an unashamedly literary novel whose preoccupation is less with telling a story in all its constituent parts and more with creating atmosphere and examining themes to do with films in general and the film “Psycho” in particular. I’ve never seen Psycho, and maybe I would have got along better with this if I had, but that said I still found things to enjoy within this novel - the bit where one of the characters is stuck in a car in the motel car park is particularly tense, and if show more you read it like a series of loosely connected short stories then each one is pretty good. The author writes with tremendous skill and confidence, and I’m pretty sure if he set about writing a novel that started at the beginning and ended at the end and left in all the dramatic bits that this one left out I’d think it was great. But I suspect he’s not that kind of author. show less