The award-winning publisher Hard Case Crime is renowned for publishing some of the biggest names in the history of mystery and crime fiction, including Megan Abbott, Lawrence Block, James M. Cain, Erle Stanley Gardner, David Goodis, Stephen King, Ed McBain, Mickey Spillane, Donald E. Westlake, and Cornell Woolrich. On rare occasions, the publisher has also released books containing elements of science fiction and fantasy by major writers such as Ray Bradbury, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King.
Later this month the award-winning publisher Hard Case Crime will release the first ever science fiction thriller from Jason Starr, the two-time Anthony Award-winning crime novelist (Twisted City) and comic book writer (Wolverine MAX): the mind-bending, world-hopping The Next Time I Die.
In Dark Times, What Type of Entertainment Do We Seek?
By Jason Starr
When the Twilight trilogy became a worldwide sensation, literary agents from Hollywood to New York instructed their clients to write paranormal romance. After the wild success of The Hunger Games, dystopian young adult novels became the “it genre.” When Gone Girlbecame a number one bestseller, it seemed like every agent and publisher was on the lookout for the next big psychological thriller, ideally with “girl” in the title.
Chasing trends has always been alluring, yettreacherous territory for writers. Even if it were possible to pinpoint the current taste of a mass audience at a particular moment, what about the time it takes for a writerto produce the work? Certainly, by the point the work is distributed, any current trend will almost have been replaced by a new trend, and the hapless writer will have to start all over again, missing trend after trend in a never-ending loop.
Nevertheless, the quest for the next big thing continues.
In the early days of the pandemic, book editors and film producers were widely rejecting works that were “too dark,” in the belief that the masses wanted entertainment that “didn’t hit too close to home.” These gatekeepers may have earnestly believed that the public would crave lightness in their entertainment to escape from the current darkness, or more likely they were projecting their own current mood onto the moods of consumers of the future.
“Nobody wants to read dark novels right now,” said a prominent New York literary agent whose list had been dominated by mysteries, thrillers and science fiction. “I’m only acquiring love stories and comedies now.”
There was some historical precedent for thisassumption that lighter escapism books would rule over darker, edgy books during Covid.
In the Depression-era 1930’s, screwball comediessuch as It Happened One Night and My Man Godfrey,ruled at the cinemas. In 1933, the invention of Supermanprovided escapism via comic books. With the onset of the Cold War, comedy blossomed on television with The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, and the fantasy of the happy American nuclear family was propagated in shows such as Father Knows Best and The Brady Bunch, counterbalancing the bleakness of the Vietnam War period.
Of course, there are many examples of trends manifesting counterintuitively to current events. During World War Two, trend prognosticators might haveassumed that escapism would prevail at cinemas, yet German expressionism of the 1940’s morphed into about two decades of markedly bleak, fatalistic films about lost hope and broken dreams that would later be called “film noir.” Similarly in the 1970’s, during the end of Vietnam and the crime-ridden mean streets of the 70’s, the dark gritty films of auteurs such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma correspondingly flourished.
In the literary world, trends rarely manifest in predictable ways. During the Depression area and into the beginning of the Second World War Gone With the Windprovided romantic escapism, yet brooding, realistic fictionthat reflected the challenges of the period, such as The Thin Man and The Grapes of Wrath, also emerged. Contrasting the comedy blossoming on TV during the 1950’s many edgy, provocative novels were published, such as The Catcher in the Rye, The Invisible Man, TheTalented Mr. Ripley, and Lolita.
The belief that light fare would dominate during the Covid pandemic didn’t pan out, at least not entirely. On TV, romantic comedies such as Emily in Paris found awide audience. Yet noirish shows such as the nihilistic The Boys, the pitch–black Ozark, and a seemingly endless stream of ultra-dark true crime content thrived as well. One of the biggest sensations of 2021 was relentlessly violent and bleak megahit, Squid Game.
At movie theaters, moviegoers predictably flocked tosee Marvel and DC event movies, but in 2021 the horror movies A Quiet Place Part II and Halloween Kills were among the top 15 box office grossers. Thematically, darker themes prevailed with Oscar nominees as well, evidenced by The Tragedy of Macbeth, the remake of noir classicNightmare Alley, and end-of–the–world dystopias Don’t Look Up and Dune.
In the book industry, thrillers by James Patterson, Stephen King, and Lee Child continued to top bestseller lists, and newcomers to the genre, such as Stacey Abrams, found wide readership as well. According to the NPD Group, thrillers accounted for the third largest category of books sold in 2021, proving that for manyreaders darkness was their literary respite, rather than lightness.
The assumption at the onset of the pandemic that that the public would flatly reject dark, edgy entertainmentproved false. In the 1930’s, predicting trends may have been easier because there was far less content competing for the public’s attention, and the movie industry itself was in its infancy. In age of self-publishing and dozens of competing streaming services, as well as video games and social media, consumers simply have more choices, making it harder for any definitive trend to take hold. Or,perhaps, the entire notion of what we need to escape during dark times requires reevaluating. Perhaps we don’t necessarily need to escape into a lighter reality, but we doseek an alternate perspective of reality to provide insightinto our own lives, and edgy, emotionally challengingcontent allows us to reconceive our lives from the viewpoint of a darker world.
When the next period of gloom inevitably sets in, rather than capitulating to gatekeepers influence on the creative process, artists would be better served byproducing the work they feel most inspired to createwithout regard for its potential trendiness. Since thepublic’s general mood can only be analyzed in retrospect,when it comes to picking the next hot trend in an increasingly complex entertainment landscape there is only one certainty: precisely what we need for our collective escapism will always remain unpredictable and elusive.
Jason Starr’s alternate reality thriller The Next Time I Die is on-sale June 28 from Hard Case Crime.
Synopsis:
In Starr’s mind-bending novel The Next Time I Die, New York defense attorney Steven Blitz is stabbed trying to break up a crime. He should have died on the spot. Instead, he wakes up the next morning, stuck in a new reality, one that is somewhere between Philip K. Dick and The Twilight Zone. There’s a different president in the White House; a loving family when he’d been on the verge of divorce; more money in the bank than he’s ever seen. There’s a dark side, though: in this world, Steven Blitz is not a good man. And now he’s got to get himself out of serious trouble without even knowing what it is he’s done wrong.
“The idea for The Next Time I Die has been percolating in me for a long time,” said Starr. “While I’ve ventured into science fiction in my work in comics, especially in my Wolverine, Ant-Man and Batman books, I’ve always wanted to write a science fiction thriller novel with real world, relatable themes. I’m beyond excited to do this book with the great Hard Case Crime, a publisher that enjoys stretching the boundaries of pulp fiction as much as I do.”
“We’re always looking for authors that bring something truly new and exciting to our genre, and Jason Starr is one of the best there is at it,” said Charles Ardai, Hard Case Crime’s award-winning founder and editor. “The Next Time I Die is ingeniously constructed and will challenge and surprise you every step of the way. It’s an irresistible read, the sort you’ll tear through breathlessly the first time and then immediately want to read again, to unpack all its secrets.”
THE NEXT TIME I DIE will draw you into its claustrophobic web of suspense and leave you questioning everything you think you know. Hard Case Crime will publish the novel on June 28, 2022. For more details follow Hard Case Crime on Twitter and Facebook and follow Jason Starr on Twitter and Instagram.
About the author:
Jason Starr is the internationally bestselling author of many crime thrillers, including Tough Luck, Twisted City, and The Follower, and his books have been published in over a dozen languages. He has also co-written several novels with Ken Bruen for Hard Case Crime, and his work in comics for Marvel, DC, Vertigo, Boom! Studios and AWA has featured Wolverine, the Punisher, Batman, Doc Savage, and Justice Inc. His latest graphic novels are Red Border and Casual Fling. Many of his books are in development for film and television. Starr has won the Anthony Award for mystery fiction twice, as well as the Barry Award. He was born in Brooklyn and lives in Manhattan.
About the publisher:
Hard Case Crime is dedicated to reviving the vigor and excitement, the suspense and thrills—the sheer entertainment—of the golden age of paperback crime novels, both by bringing back into print the best work of the pulp era and by introducing readers to new work by some of today’s most powerful writers and artists. Determined detectives and dangerous women…fortune hunters and vengeance seekers…ingenious criminals and men on the run…Hard Case Crime novels offer everything you want from a great story, all in handsome and affordable editions.
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Art credit – Hard Case Crime