A dark and stylish novel of psychological suspense about a young theater critic drawn into a dangerous game that blurs the lines between reality and performance.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Alexis Soloski’s Here in the Dark, which is out now.
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, she reluctantly agrees to an interview, a conversation that reveals secrets she thought she had long since buried. Then her interviewer disappears and she learns―from his devastated fiancée―that she was the last person to have seen him alive. When the police refuse to investigate, Vivian does what she promised herself she would never do again: she plays a part. Assuming the role of amateur detective, she turns her critical gaze toward an unsanitary private eye, a sketchy internet startup, a threatening financier, fake blood, and one very real corpse. As she nears the final act, 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 glamor, Alexis Soloski’s 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.
CURTAIN RAISER
Playing Dead
I am seven years old. I am in the dark. I am wearing a blue velvet dress and black buckled shoes. I am sitting, so still, in a chair much too big for me. I am watching.
In front of me, one man lunges toward another with a knife. Blood blossoms on a white shirt, the stain opening like a flower, as the second man crumples to his knees, then to the ground. The first man stands above him, smiling thin and sharp. Then he turns that smile to me.
I can’t swallow. I can’t breathe. My fists grip the armrests, every knuckle white.
“Don’t worry,” my mother says softly. “He isn’t dead. You can see him breathing. Look at his stomach: it’s going in and out. See? It isn’t real. It’s only a play. But you’re real.” She gently unbends one of my hands and covers it with her own, whispering a litany she has whispered many times before, her head so close to mine that her lips brush my ear. “These are your fingers,” she says. “This is your hand, your palm, your wrist, your arm . . .”
But this time I can’t hear her. Or I won’t. Instead, I watch the shirt, the blood, the knife, the smile. I know the man will come for me next. I move to stand. I want to run. But I collapse back into my too-big chair.
I faint.
Curtains fall. Curtains rise. A second act, twenty-five years later. My mother is dead and I sit in the dark so often now. I watch stabbings, shootings, strangulation. Worse.
“Death,” says the Duchess of Malfi in a play I adore, “hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits.” I believe her. I keep count.
As I watch, I swallow. I breathe. My lungs empty and fill, my stomach swells and subsides. Chairs fit me better now. I don’t wear velvet dresses or buckled black shoes. I certainly don’t faint.
Instead I sit, here in the dark, and I slide my pen noiselessly along the lines of my notebook. I have learned to flick the pages with a minimum of rustle. I have learned to write without light.
I am attentive. I am discerning. I am very nearly happy.
I became a theater critic.
Of course I did.
CHAPTER 1
NUMBER WITHHELD
When the phone rings, on a damp November Wednesday, I’m in the bath. I have just returned from the bank, depositing the check—overlarge, on thick, cream stock—from the executor of my aunt’s estate and arranging its disbursement. I had not seen my aunt in years, had barely corresponded with her beyond compulsory birthday and Christmas cards. Death came for her punctually and without prelude, which must have met with her approval. Though she may have preferred a place more fit and private than the parking lot of a Hannaford on a late afternoon in May, just before the dinner rush. A heart attack, proof at last that she had a heart at all, her body falling in a way, I was told, that set off her car alarm. She would not have liked the noise. I had not expected an inheritance. But as it happened, she divided her fortune—a small savings account, a smaller civic pension, the proceeds from the sale of her house—between me and a local wildlife charity. She had always favored birds over people, and in this I could not blame her. Though I don’t really care for birds.
I do not need her money. But taking it seemed easier than any alternative. So I listened, a close-lipped smile mortared to my face, while an adviser at the bank, a sweaty, pink-cheeked white man in a striped tie that I would swear in any court was a clip-on, lectured me, in a voice like a leaking faucet, about funds and bonds and certificates of deposit.
“Let’s just do whatever is most safe,” I finally told him. Because it was not what he wanted to hear. And because I am safe about some things.
My aunt, however distant—she lived in New Hampshire, which in New York City terms might as well have been the moon—was the last person in my world who knew my mother, the last person but one who knew me as I was before. I might have received her death as an invitation to step more completely into the small life that I have made for myself or to step into some new larger one, unburdened now. To live, at last, in full. And some part of me—yearning, wild still—must want that. But when the news of her passing reached me, I stepped nowhere except along my typical routes, into assorted theaters and then back to my apartment with an occasional low-lit bar to vary the scene. The executor also sent me two yellowing photo albums, which showed my aunt and my mother as kids and then adolescents and then young women—long limbed, freckled, alive. I paged through them once, then shoved them onto the tallest shelf of the closet, where they have remained.
If I were the sort of person who allowed myself much in the way of an emotional life—in daylight hours, anyway—I suppose I would have felt lonely, orphaned, unmoored. Instead I applied myself to the notebook page and the laptop screen as I never had before, writing and rewriting until each paragraph glittered, diamond bright and twice as sharp, which was only slightly sharper than my usual. This is the curse and blessing of the critical instinct, the irrepressible impulse to report the truth of a work of art, no matter whom that truth offends. These shows invited me. They invited criticism. They should have been finer, sturdier, more plausible. They weren’t. And here I was to tell them so, angling for the magazine’s chief critic’s job with every quip and censure.
That job has stood open for two months now, ever since Crispin “Crispy” Holt, scion of a wealthy Boston family, who fled Princeton as soon as he had his first taste of the Living Theatre (and some extremely high-grade LSD) and had written for the magazine for decades, finally announced his retirement. Rumor has it he shipped his inherited wealth to some Caribbean tax haven, where he can enjoy flashbacks and the occasional cabana boy in tropical ease. I can’t confirm this rumor. As a female who lacks a four-octave range, I was beneath Crispy’s notice. But for Roger, my editor, I am a sort of protégée, a local girl made something better and more clickable than good. I was certain he would tip me for the job straightaway. Instead he alternates my columns with those of the other junior critic, Caleb Jones. Caleb has a newly minted dramaturgy MFA, a retina-scarring smile, and the aesthetic discernment of a wedge salad. Me, I have taste for days. And a brisk, prickly style. Roger will see sense. Eventually.
On this morning, the adviser eventually presented me with a stack of papers and I initialed and signed, initialed and signed, then handed back his pen (I have better ones at home) and drifted out onto the pavement and up the five flights of stairs to my apartment. I poured a drink, because my aunt did not approve of drink and because I have been drinking more lately—I have to, the pills don’t work the way they used to—and ran a very hot bath, to feel something or nothing or both at once, tipping my head back until water filled my ears and the city went quiet and remote.
But that cell phone ring—the shrill factory setting I have never bothered to change—sounds, then stops, then sounds again, reaching me even here. Scam callers rarely phone twice. It could be Roger, I tell myself, needing me for some final query or to workshop some display copy. So I move to answer it.
Drops skitter against the porcelain as I stand, wobbly legged, bracing myself against the wall until my blood pressure evens, shaking the redblack spots from in front of my eyes. Wrapped in a thin towel, I shuffle to the living room—I live in a studio, so really, it’s the only room—and reach into my bag for the phone. I’ve missed two calls from the magazine. The main desk, not Roger’s extension. I dial and Esteban, our receptionist, answers.
“It’s Vivian,” I say, lowering my voice toward the gothic. “You rang?”
“Gorgeous,” he chirps, “where you been?”
“East Tenth. Roaming the halls in my satin peignoir and mourning your loss to womankind.”
He giggles at a pitch that would shatter crystal. He knows my apartment isn’t large enough for halls. He also knows that I don’t own a single peignoir.
“Poor bebita,” he says. “Well, maybe I got you a consolation prize. A man keeps calling for you. Has a sexy voice. Like very sexy.”
“You didn’t give him this number?” I say, wrapping the towel more tightly.
“Tch, bebita. Credit. Please. Tried to tell him your email, but he says he wants to talk to you.”
“Ten to one he’s a publicist.”
“A sexy publicist.”
“Absurd. Impossible. Against every natural law.”
“Maybe, bebita. But he is your problem now.”
He gives me the man’s name, David Adler, and his phone number, which I record sulkily in the nearest notebook, my dripping hair dotting the page like tears. I smile my way through “Thanks” and “Talk soon” and then let my face slacken as the call ends. Having fumbled into clothes, I slouch into the armchair, balancing the laptop on my thighs. I search my email for “David Adler,” then repeat the search in the trash folder. It returns no results. So he isn’t linked to any recent play or musical. At least none I’ve heard of. Which must make him an untried director or a junior publicist set on me reviewing some show so far off Broadway that the subway runs out of track. My uninterest is profound. You can see only so much failed theater and live to tell.
Yet I think of what Roger keeps saying. How he would prefer more sympathy in my reviews or, failing that, a warmer relationship with the artistic community. He calls it the “Let’s Not Be Such a Withholding Bitch, Shall We, Kiddo?” plan. Roger has been to sensitivity training. The training did not take.
Warmth is not my forte. As far as the rich palette of human experience goes, I live on a gray scale. Aristotle said that drama was an imitation of an action. I am, of necessity, an imitation of myself—a sharp smile, an acid joke, an abyss where a woman should be. For a decade and more I have allowed myself only this lone role, a minor one: Vivian Parry, actor’s scourge and girl-about-town. I don’t play it particularly well.
Except when I’m seeing theater, good theater. When I’m in the dark, at that safe remove from daily life, I feel it all—rage, joy, surprise. Until the houselights come on and break it all apart again, I am alive. I know myself again. Here is a dream I often have: I’m walking the streets of Times Square and I’ve lost the address of the theater I am meant to attend, so I keep wandering, usually in the rain, faster now as the time moves closer to curtain, wet through, up one block and down the next, just wanting and wanting, without remedy, without end.
The profession of theater critic isn’t especially necessary or exalted. Here is P. G. Wodehouse on reviewers: “Nobody loves them, and rightly, for they are creatures of the night.” But it is the only thing I am good at. The only survivable thing. And I want to practice it with more choice in what I see and what I don’t, more space to take in art through ear and eye and strange neuronic tangle and make sense of what results, more opportunities to feel real, even for just a few hours at a time. I am firmly in my thirties now, older than my mother was when she had me, and I would welcome some confirmation that I have not wasted my life. That I was right to choose to have a life at all. Full benefits wouldn’t hurt either. So if a call is what it takes to get the job, I can make it. With Roger’s advice in mind, I tap in David Adler’s number, confident in the blocker I’ve installed on my phone. On his screen all he will see is “Number Withheld.”
He answers before the first ring has finished.
“Hello,” I say. “This is Vivian Parry. You’ve been trying to reach me?”
David Adler isn’t a publicist. Or a director. He’s a media studies master’s student with a breathy tenor—a clarinet with a broken reed—that I find entirely resistible. His thesis, he tells me, centers on critics—their influences, their preferences. He’s eager to include a theater critic, especially a female theater critic, especially a younger one, there are still too few women writing, aren’t there? He has read my work for years and please will I meet with him? Please can he interview me?
I can hear the need threading his voice. Aching. Ugly.
If David Adler is a scholar, not an artist, then he’s of no use to me. But just as he can hear me inhaling to refuse, he adds that he’s putting together a panel at the Performance Presenters conference in January and he’d love to enlist me for that, too. American Stage has promised to publish excerpts.
So I bite back that refusal, like an epileptic chomping her own tongue. An interview and a panel stint that invite me to explain my relationship to art, that link my rigor to my love for the form, these could help convince Roger that I’m the woman for the byline. So I suggest a time the following Tuesday. He asks me for a location and I name a nearby patisserie, shaping my mouth into a smile so that the words don’t come out too clipped. He needs material. I need exposure. I’m familiar with this transaction. Most arts journalism mirrors it. Counterfeiting eagerness and basic human decency makes it seem less tawdry. I end the call as quickly as I can, returning to my laptop to translate the experience of the play I saw last night—an early Fornés drama—into argument and image and evidenced claim.
The day darkens without my noticing and by the time I click send, there’s barely time to swipe my lips with something dark and matte— cheap costuming—and detour to the corner store for a milky coffee and a bag of salted plantain chips that I sip and crunch as I race-walk to the train. Then it’s down into the subway and back up again into the lights and billboards of Times Square, a place so fake it makes theater seem more real by comparison.
Shouldering past tourists, sidestepping ticket holders, I lunge for the theater as if I’m cresting finish line tape and make my way toward a waiting cluster of lip-glossed press agents, their shining, home-straightened hair already curling in the evening’s mist. One of the women separates herself from the group and presses an envelope into my hand. I grin to keep from flinching. Her name is Kerry. Or maybe Sharon. I can name every Shakespeare comedy in first folio order, but I can’t tell these brunettes apart.
“Just the single ticket, ri-ight?” she says, that last syllable soaring toward the marquee.
“You be-et,” I echo.
Time was, every play I saw, I saw with my mother, my hand in hers across the armrest, and then an ice cream after, where we would talk through all the parts we liked the best. When I was small, I would fall asleep on the car ride home and she would carry me to my bed, so that I couldn’t tell where the show ended and I began. In my dreams, I would imagine myself back in the theater, playing all the parts. But I don’t act anymore. Not onstage. And now I always go alone.
“I gave you the aisle, just in case you need to escape,” the press agent says. She looks as though she would like to wink at me. But winking gives you crow’s-feet.
“You know me so well,” I say, turning toward the doors and leaving the smile behind.
A velvet rope parts and I’m beckoned in, past the crowd. My bag is checked, my ticket scanned. A first usher hands me a Playbill, then sends me down the aisle to a second usher, who directs me to a seat that I could have found myself. I greet colleagues—hunched and flustered or jolly and brazen—as they pass me, chatting about what we have seen. But my attention always returns to the stage and its closed curtains—waiting, wanting.
I stand and sit several times, letting latecomers take their places, before I settle myself with notebook and Playbill and pen. The preshow music cuts out, the lights dim, and except for the beeps and chimes of phones powering down, the room goes sweet and mute and I remember how many thousands of nights in how many thousands of seats I have sat just like this, hushed and expectant. This evening’s play, midcareer Noël Coward, doesn’t invite and won’t reward my ardor, but I will give it anyway until the lights come up and I cram myself back into my body and stumble up the aisle, still poised between this world and the other. But now, here—finally!—the curtain parts. My gaze goes soft, my lips part. I’m away. I’m home.
EXCERPTED FROM HERE IN THE DARK. COPYRIGHT © 2023 BY ALEXIS SOLOSKI. EXCERPTED BY PERMISSION OF FLATIRON BOOKS, A DIVISION OF MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS. NO PART OF THIS EXCERPT MAY BE REPRODUCED OR REPRINTED WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER.
