Michael Noll, Program Director
Bang by Daniel Peña
Arte Publico Press
January 30, 2018
In the intense national discussion of the novel American Dirt, one of the things that sometimes gets said is that the book would have drawn less notice–that its errors would have been less egregious–if it had been marketed as a thriller. But, of course, page-turners (whether they’re in the thriller genre or simply using conventions from it) should not be viewed as a wasteland of cultural appropriation. For example, there is Daniel Peña’s recent novel Bang. It involves characters who are undocumented and live on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. It also involves cartels, a plane crash, and an urgent sense of threat.
From page one, Bang demonstrates the ways that thriller conventions can be written into a very specific depiction of place, as in this opening scene of a woman waiting for her deported husband to return from Mexico:
“In her hands, she holds a portable transistor radio that she’s modified to pick up police radios, EMT radios, border patrol radios and twangy, redneck rag chew coming in over the CB waves. She listens for any news of her husband, trying to make sense of the garbled English blaring from the transistor’s speaker. The radio cuts in and out. Static.”
Evan Parks, Project Specialist
The Body Double by Emily Beyda
Doubleday
March 3, 2020
The Body Double by Emily Beyda (coming out in March from Doubleday) is a Hitchcockian thriller through modern day LA as our nameless narrator finds herself hired into one of the strangest jobs available, the body double for a celebrity who can’t handle the limelight anymore. Reading this novel calls to mind classics like Du Maurier’s Rebecca as our narrator struggles to maintain her sense of identity while assuming the identity of another. Filled to the brim with characters you don’t know if you can trust, the dark side of paradise, and intrigue, The Body Double earns the right to call itself a noir.
