Steve Thomas: Laura, welcome to the show.
Laura Sims: Thank you so much. I’m glad to be here.
Steve Thomas: So most of the time on the podcast I’m talking to librarians about library work, and for the summer I do my series with authors, and sometimes I get the best of both worlds: I get authors who are also librarians!
Can you tell listeners about your path to working in libraries and what kind of library work you do now?
Laura Sims: Sure. Yeah, I came to libraries not long ago. So I had been an adjunct instructor at a number of different universities in New York and elsewhere, and I loved teaching, but at a certain point I was like, “This is not a career.” This was when I was writing poetry, too, so I was not making any money from my writing.
Steve Thomas: You mean when you were a rich and famous poet …
Laura Sims: Yeah, a rich and famous poet. But yeah, so I had not been making money doing that, of course, and I just had always been interested in doing something in the libraries and had always been a fan and all of that. So I decided to go back and get my MLIS in gosh, when was it? 2016? And then I sold my first novel, so since then I’ve been able to combine writing and library work. I work part-time. I was a reference librarian and my last book, How Can I Help You?, is about a reference librarian. And now I’m a part-time children’s librarian, And I love it. I love it a lot. I work two days a week, and so it really allows me to combine writing and library work. And it’s such a nice combination for a writer because you spend so much time in your head alone, typing and then I get to go out and be with the people, and it’s the public, and it’s a good balance.
Steve Thomas: And with the cute little kids!
Laura Sims: With the cute little kids!
Steve Thomas: But you do not write books for those children to read.
Laura Sims: No, I really don’t. Yeah, it’s a weird combination.
Steve Thomas: Have you ever thought about writing a kids book?
Laura Sims: I have tried. I have tried. I did. When I started writing fiction, I tried to write… I wrote a picture book. I cannot draw, so I just did the text. And I wrote a couple of YA novels that never saw the light of day. And then I wrote my first novel, Looker, and I was like, “Oh, this is not for children or teens,” and that was, like, my path and it’s a better fit for me.
But I have always loved children’s literature and I wish, if I had the artistic skills, I just feel like picture books are the most perfect form of book that there is. They’re so beautiful and poetic but I would want to be able to do both.
Steve Thomas: Right, ’cause you want it to be, there’s obviously some wonderful collaborations that have happened of wonderful writers and wonderful illustrators, but there is something special about that sole creator kind of thing that this, the book is entirely them. It’s like a singer-songwriter just feels more impressive. Whitney Houston has a beautiful voice, but she never wrote a song in her life.
Laura Sims: Right.
Steve Thomas: She’s still great, but it’s oh, yeah, but then Taylor Swift writes them and sings them. And so it’s like there’s a different…
Laura Sims: Everything’s about Taylor.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. It’s all about Taylor.
Laura Sims: It’s all about Taylor.
Steve Thomas: I have a 19-year-old daughter, so it’s all about Taylor.
Laura Sims: Oh, yeah. I’m 52, and I’m all about Taylor.
Steve Thomas: Yep. Can you tell listeners a little bit about, we didn’t have you on the show to talk about your library book, but people should go out and read that, but for The Man, can you give the elevator pitch for it?
Laura Sims: Sure. Yes. The Man is about a New Jersey housewife living in the suburbs in the 1960s, and she is an amateur photographer, and she’s incredibly talented. She doesn’t really know it. She does it as a hobby. But she does take a class at the local community college, and she has this instructor, Paul, who really encourages her in her photography and tells her that she has a very special gift and she should share it widely, which is something she does not want to do. And so he inspires her.
She begins taking these really innovative self-portraits in storefront windows and other reflective surfaces, and they’re really cool. But when she prints them, there is the shadowy figure of a man in the background of every one, as if he had been standing there when she took the picture, and she can’t help but think of this man who assaulted her years and years ago, and that somehow it could be him, and it goes from there.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and he’s not just a man, he’s The Man, right?
Laura Sims: The man. Yeah.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and setting it in the ’60s lets you get those scenes in the dark room, ’cause otherwise she takes it and then looks at it on her phone immediately…
Laura Sims: I know. It’s not the same. It would not have been satisfying at all.
Steve Thomas: Is there any other reason that you thought this story will work better… or I guess where did you start with the story? Did you start with the story? Did it have to take place in the ’60s in your head?
Laura Sims: It started with the character. She’s largely inspired by Vivian Maier, the nanny photographer from the 1950s who also took these really innovative self-portraits that, when her work was discovered in the early 2000s, it looked totally contemporary.
And she also had just a strange life. She was a nanny. She never published her photographs when she was alive, and she was very private. She wasn’t discovered until after her death, and there was something haunting about her, and I think I started to think about what if someone like Vivian Maier was actually haunted by her work. So it just had the feel of the 60’s, Vivian Maier’s a little earlier, but that feel of that time, and I also wanted to put it at the point of the heyday of photography.
Diane Arbus and other people, really all the street photographers, were really active then. And so I thought it would be cool to have, this nobody woman from the suburbs outdoing all of them in secret and that made for some really interesting tensions between female artists and their mentors and all kinds of things that we still have today, but more accentuated then.
Steve Thomas: Yeah and Judith has some emotional issues with her past. You talked about her being attacked. But then even with her marriage, that she does love her husband, but he’s, I guess typical for the era, not as emotionally connected with her, and there’s a detachment there. He’s just had a medical emergency recently, so she’s trying to be careful around him, too. And you get the feeling that, he’s not a villain of the piece in that he’s not an abuser, in that way…
Laura Sims: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. He does love her and she loves him, but there is this possessiveness that he has, and he doesn’t understand her photographs the way her instructor does. So there’s that contrast, too. It was fun to play with.
Steve Thomas: And I think that really draws her to the instructor because he’s giving her this emotional need that she has that her husband won’t.
Laura Sims: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. She’s definitely getting a lot from that relationship.
Steve Thomas: She often sees the world, I think, through a lens, whether she’s actually taking a photo or not, she’s looking, what’s the shot here that I could get? Take two steps to the right, I can get this perfect shot. And some of that lets her, When she’s talking about it in those terms, she feels detached emotionally. You’re not a person anymore, you’re just a subject. Basically you’re a bowl of fruit on the table.
Laura Sims: She’s like a consummate artist, I feel like, in many ways. Photography is a way for her to process the world because she is fragile in a way and gives her this distance that she needs from it emotionally. Yeah. It’s the perfect introvert’s art form in a lot of ways.
Steve Thomas: And it lets her see, not the truth about people, but truths about people that she feels like, she’s seeing through people to see what, who they really are. Early on, this isn’t spoiling anything really, she’s taking photos at a party that her friend asked her to, and they want the posed pictures of, “Oh, look, we’re smiling,” or whatever, but she wants to take candids, and those candids is where she feels like she’s getting the, “Oh, that’s the relationship between these people that I captured in this photo.”
Laura Sims: Yeah, exactly. She lays bare the truth.
Steve Thomas: But she would never say anything like that.
Laura Sims: No. No. She’s very polite and reserved in person, but her art is where she’s wild.
Steve Thomas: Her husband probably bought her that camera. I can’t remember if it said where she got the camera, but it starts as a hobby basically.
Laura Sims: Exactly. Yeah, she started, I do remember this now. I do remember my own book now. She started taking pictures in childhood. I think she took it from her dad’s desk, and it helped her process the trauma of what had happened to her, and it was like a safe place for her to go.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. It was probably an early way of compartmentalizing. Let me capture this on film so that it is remembered as data for me to remember, but not to actually deal with.
Laura Sims: Exactly.
Steve Thomas: But obviously I think for her, it starts that way, but it’s not a hobby for her, it’s like a necessity, in the same way any great artist, like it’s a necessity to create art.
Laura Sims: Yes, she needs it. So when she does see the shadows in the background, there are these kind of competing urges that develop of “Should I stop doing this? Is this like wrong somehow?” But that’s a really difficult choice for her to make.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and she’s constantly now, after she sees it, once she takes another one of her self-portraits, she’s turning around and looking and seeing, is that person there? And there’s nobody there. But then when she does the negatives, there it is.
Laura Sims: I know. Yeah. He’s very creepy.
Steve Thomas: Yes. No, yeah, and you describe it very well. It’s very creepy imagery ’cause it’s just basically there’s, it’s just a smudge, but it’s enough of a shape that it really is something, but she can’t figure out. And do you think her self-portraits are a way of her trying to figure herself out too?
Laura Sims: I think so, yeah. I think it’s like a safe way for her subconsciously anyway to plumb her own depths because, the way she does with other people, revealing these difficult truths about other people, she’s doing with herself in this way that I don’t think she’s capable of doing in another way, like with a therapist or on her own. Definitely. Yeah, her art is also like her therapy.
Steve Thomas: Which I think is probably part of why she doesn’t wanna share it. Like you said, the instructor keeps saying, “Oh, you should send these into magazines. These are actually really good!”
Laura Sims: Yeah. And it was my answer for one of the things that drew me to Vivian Maier the actual photographer who inspired Judith, was the fact that she had been so private about her work and had kept it out of the public eye her whole life, and just wondering what was that about? She had thousands of photographs: street photographs, self-portraits, everything, and you just wonder, why not, I don’t know, figure it out, how to share it? And she didn’t, and she didn’t want to. So it was intriguing to try and answer that question through Judith to some extent.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, ’cause there’s a difference between … artistic creation is really, it can just be for the sake of creating. You don’t have to share your art necessarily, but then the rest of us who are not creating that art look at it and go, “But that’s beautiful art, you should share it!” But it’s part of you, and you’re somebody like Judith that doesn’t wanna share you…
Laura Sims: Exactly. Yeah.
Steve Thomas: And with her, she doesn’t just take standard self-portraits. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of self-portraits she takes?
Laura Sims: Sure. Yeah. And some of these are based loosely on Vivian Maier’s. I’m saying “May-er” and “My-er”, because I’m not certain which one it is. I usually say “May-er”, so stick with that. But some of these are loosely based on Vivian Maier’s self-portraits.
One of the ones she takes in the book is a liquor store, and it’s like the outline of her figure reflected in the liquor store window with all these colorful bottles shining out of her body when she prints them. And she had an alcoholic father. So again, you’re like, she’s maybe subconsciously processing that past through her art. She is drawn to that image. And she does other things, takes a self-portrait in the side of a metal toaster or a compact mirror that’s fallen into the street. This is a little later. So she’s just really innovative, not only in the structuring of the photograph, but also the materials that she’s using to take.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And it feels like, I don’t think she’s even aware that she’s exploring herself as much as she is?
Laura Sims: No, I don’t think so either.
Steve Thomas: Yeah ’cause like you said, the liquor store thing is the perfect example. This is inside of you because of your father, but there’s that space between what’s true and what’s perception and what is a photograph getting? Is it getting the truth? ‘Cause it’s a moment in time, but we don’t live in a moment of time!
Laura Sims: Yeah, and I think some of the best photographs get all of that, the moment and then the layers beneath it. Really fascinating.
Steve Thomas: How did you come to the title of just The Man?
Laura Sims: Oh, The Man? I’m trying to remember, but I know that when I landed on it, I think I realized I was saying The Man a lot, right? Because there’s this man in the background, and I thought, “Oh, I just want this simple, bold title.” There are a lot of men in the book, and I feel like each of them is The Man in different ways. I just like all the resonances of the phrase. There’s The Man, that we all say contemporarily. And then there’s the figure of the man, very specific, and then there’s, her husband, who represents a kind of man or a kind of patriarchy, and then there’s Paul, her instructor.
So yeah, I liked both the specific and the symbolic possibilities of the title, and I did like it that it was simple. I like simple titles a lot. There’s a lot of “The Man Who…” “The Man With…” blah, but there aren’t a lot of “The Man.” Yeah, so that’s good.
Steve Thomas: I read, a couple of reviews and stuff of the book, and being a man, I would not know a lot about this personally, but a lot of people mentioned that the feeling of the man being behind her and everything is very familiar to a lot of women, and my wife and other women in my life have told me, “When you’re following a woman, don’t get too close. Do something to make sure they’re aware that you are a safe person.” Do you feel like that’s part of the background of this too?
Laura Sims: Oh, yeah. I wasn’t thinking about it consciously, but there are a lot of scenes that capture that feeling that I think probably all women have had at some point of yeah, being in a shadowy parking garage and kind of starting to run for it for no reason. Or you hear something behind you and you run. It definitely taps into this kind of universal female fear. And not just with Judith. There are some other characters too. So yeah, I’m not surprised that female readers have noted that.
Steve Thomas: And it feels photography is Judith’s way of not only understanding herself, but escaping her life almost even? ‘Cause she has all these expectations of, some of it just typical ’60s housewife / woman. It’s a way of rebellion almost.
Laura Sims: Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think it is. And I think all art is a kind of rebellion against the boredom of life no matter what age or what your status is. I think it’s like a rebellion against the monotony in a lot of ways.
Steve Thomas: You mentioned you wrote poetry before, probably still write poetry, but how do you use that experience as a poet in writing narrative fiction?
Laura Sims: Yeah, that’s a good question. I feel like no matter what I write, poetry or prose, it all kind of starts from the same origin point or points, which are voice, emotion, character, imagery. So those are like my touchstones for writing, and they were in poetry, and they are now. And the difference, of course, is that I have to spend so much time now figuring out “Okay, what happens now?” Like the plot, all that pesky plot stuff.
I do feel like I am a pretty spare writer. I wrote very spare poetry, and poetry itself is spare, so I carry a lot of that into fiction writing. I also, my endings, I’m not giving anything away, but my endings are often surprising or unexpected. I feel like having these kind of abrupt endings, which some people love and some people hate, but to me I like to leave space in the book for the collaboration of the reader, which I think is a poetry thing. It’s like when you read a poem, you have to work with the writer. You have to fill in the empty spaces. And so I do like leaving things unsaid, not just the ending. But like I do like ambiguity. I like leaving those things preserved in fiction so that the reader can fill that in and make what they want of it.
Steve Thomas: When I was getting my English degree, I had a teacher, I don’t know if you agree with it, it works for me, but they said the key to reading poetry, and especially talking about Shakespeare and things like that is to read it out loud. Because some of it definitely is how it is on the page, because depending on what kind of poetry you’re writing, sometimes it is structurally that. But when you read it also, the key is, there’s rhythms but read it as if you’re just reading it. Don’t stop at the end of every line. Ba-da, ba-da, ba-da. Ba-da, ba-da, ba-da. Ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da. Ba-da, ba-da, ba-da. It’s like when you read Shakespeare, read until you hit a comma, and then you pause, and then you go forward. When you hit another comma, pause, but you don’t stop at the end of each line.
Laura Sims: Right.
Steve Thomas: And so poetry is almost made to be heard.
Laura Sims: Definitely. And the sound of lines is still really important to me. Like, when I’m revising, revision is hard because, I do a ton of revision, but once it gets towards the end and I have the sound, it’s very hard to mess with the line because then it’s “Ugh, now the sound is all off.” I got the meaning in there, but now I have to play with this until it sounds better.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And I can see what you’re saying with the spare, you don’t have really long chapters. They’re not James Patterson three-page short, but they are not super long, and it’s not 40 pages, 50, 60 pages to a chapter. I always think that helps with mysteries and thrillers, ’cause even if you don’t end with a huge cliffhanger, you end with something to make you wanna keep reading. And if it’s shorter, you can go, “Oh, I can read one more chapter. Oh, I can read one more chapter.” But if I’m looking and it’s another 40 pages, I’m like, “Eh, I’m going to bed.”
Laura Sims: Exactly. I know. I know. And it’s really, like, all I can do. I have written some longer chapters in the last book I did, but this one I felt, yeah, like it had to have short, imagistic chapters. And yeah, it totally helps pull you along.
Steve Thomas: In your writing process, I’ve asked several of the authors here this summer, but are you a plotter, or are you one of those that makes it up as you go along?
Laura Sims: Make it up as I go along. Yeah, I have never… I have tried to be a plotter, because I am a plotter in every other way in my life. I have to-do lists and sub-to-do lists but in my writing, I’ve found that having an outline, it just kills the book. What I do is once I get to the end of the writing for the day, I will stop and think, “Okay, what comes next?” And that’s more to help me when I sit down the next day and not be overwhelmed. But it is a sort of outlining. And then I do outline once I have a complete draft and I go through and make an outline of what I’ve got, and that really helps me revise because then I’m like, “Oh, this doesn’t make sense. I need to bridge this.”
Steve Thomas: I’m sure there’s a balance there, too, ’cause like Chekhov’s gun kind of thing. If the gun is sitting there on the table, you don’t wanna emphasize it too much ’cause you don’t want people to go, “Somebody’s gonna get shot!” I’m sure that’s a challenge.
Laura Sims: Yes, totally. I had to do that in my last book. I had to plant something back in the chapters and make it unobtrusive.
Steve Thomas: And when you start, does it usually start with a basic idea and then goes from there, or does a whole story come to mind?
Laura Sims: Usually it’s a character and a voice. My first novel, Looker, was literally from a voice that I heard in my head, and I just followed it, and a sort of vague idea. So that’s usually the combo is a voice, a character, a vague idea. And I just try to go with it, which means you have to do a lot of work later, ’cause I try to just write. I do not stop. I try to just write a whole first draft as fast as I can, because I find that if you stop and start tinkering with things, you might never go on. So I just try to do it all, and then I can fix it later. I love to revise. So once I have words on the page, I enjoy that process a lot more, a lot more than drafting.
Steve Thomas: It’s better just for people like you who just wanna write through it, just wanna get it on the page, and then get it structured.
Laura Sims: Yeah. Yeah, and it is very bad when I get it on the page. So bad.
Steve Thomas: Nobody wants to read your first draft.
Laura Sims: No. No. So embarrassing. I type a first draft, but then I print it, and I go through it by hand, and the pages are literally covered in ink. So I almost rewrite the whole thing like two or three times.
Steve Thomas: How many drafts do you think you would do before you do share it with somebody? Does anybody see that first draft?
Laura Sims: My best friend Margaret does, who used to live in Atlanta. She’s now in Seattle. She’s not a writer. She’s an avid reader, and I can send her whatever, and she’ll just eat it up and give me feedback and cheer me on. So that’s wonderful to have somebody in your corner like that who’s “Okay, yeah, send it to me. I’m gonna read it tonight.” It just gives you a little bit of steam. But even then, it wouldn’t be like a first draft. But definitely she’s my earliest reader.
I’ve started to share it earlier with my agent than I used to. It used to scare me to send it to him too but now he’s my second reader, but not until I’ve really gotten it down.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. See, that’s like Judith, that you wanna make sure what you’re putting out in the world, you’re afraid to share, too!
Laura Sims: Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. In some ways, yeah. It is terrifying to put your work out there. Especially now with Goodreads and online people rating your books like it’s a vacuum.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and just everyday people, ’cause before, like in the old days it would be like, “Oh I got these book reviewers at the newspapers are gonna read it and that’s it.”
Laura Sims: Now it’s like free-for-all, and anonymous so you can say whatever you want.
Steve Thomas: Hopefully people will be kind to you for this book.
Laura Sims: Oh, we’ll see.
Steve Thomas: And then just, since you work in libraries, not that you’re using your patrons or anything, but does working in libraries help you in your observations of the world as a writer?
Laura Sims: Absolutely. And I really used them, not my real patrons, but I really used those observations in my last book, How Can I Help You? That book came about not long after I started working in public libraries. I had just come out of grad school, and I hadn’t worked in a public library before so I was really amazed by the disconnect between what I’d studied in school and then the reality of, like, even a small-town public library. It’s intense. And so the book started, that book, not The Man, started when I was, like, writing things down that I observed or somebody said to me, like the strange things people say.
But I think that libraries are amazing places for writers because you see the whole spectrum of life, and intimate exchanges taking place. You see all kinds of stuff, and it’s a very rich field for a writer.
Steve Thomas: We see the whole public.
Laura Sims: Yeah, exactly. And you get your hands on books as soon as they come out, so that’s the other thing I love.
Steve Thomas: To wrap up a little bit, what do you hope readers get out of this book?
Laura Sims: I hope that they enjoy the reading experience, of course, and that it’s propulsive and entertaining and all of those things. But I also hope that they are able to see or enjoy the layers beneath that surface that have to do with female power or powerlessness and the female artist and relationships between mentors and mentees and questions about who owns art and the female fear. Also a lot of questions about fame and the consequences of fame come up. So yeah, I hope that it’s working on multiple levels is what I hope that readers get. And maybe some readers just read it and think it’s fun and scary or creepy, and then other people read it in a different way. So I hope that readers come to it and enjoy it.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And I like what you said about, without spoiling anything, that you leave it in a place where you’re almost encouraging that conversation to continue ’cause you are, as the writer, the person in the room by themselves writing it, but you want it to be a conversation eventually. You wrote this book a year ago or whatever, but you want this to have a conversation now.
Laura Sims: Exactly. Yeah. And I think there is definitely room for conversation at the end. Things do, I like to wrap things up to an extent, but not with a tidy bow. So everything’s answered.
Steve Thomas: You’re not ending with, “To be continued.”
Laura Sims: No. No.
Steve Thomas: And do you have any hints about any upcoming work?
Laura Sims: I am working on a book that has to do with UFO experiences.
Steve Thomas: Ooh.
Laura Sims: And the people who have them.
Steve Thomas: And this’ll be in the same sort of genre that you normally write in?
Laura Sims: I think so. I call my genre “weird psychological thrillers.”
Steve Thomas: Yeah, there you go.
Laura Sims: There you go. So that fits right in.
Steve Thomas: You can’t write a children’s book, a picture book in “weird psychological thriller?”
Laura Sims: I feel like there need to be more scary books for children, and I am the one in my department who orders the scary books for children because I was that kid. I wanted the books about UFOs and Loch Ness Monster and all of that stuff. And there’s not enough of it.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. There’s more of it now. I think they’re finally seeing that there’s a market for that kind of stuff where you can have the haunted house stories. Not just, “Oh, I guess I’ll read Scary Stories to Read in the Dark.”
Laura Sims: Over and over!
Steve Thomas: And Goosebumps, and that’s it. That’s all there is.
Laura Sims: Or Nancy Drew, which is what I had!
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I was gonna say that even those things weren’t around when I was a kid, didn’t have much, but Bunnicula was my favorite book when I was a kid, so that’s basically a horror book, I think. I think it counts for kids.
Laura Sims: Yeah, and the Phantom Tollbooth.
Steve Thomas: Well, Laura, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it.
Laura Sims: It was too much fun. Thank you, Steve.
Steve Thomas: And listeners, go out there and either go to your favorite bookseller or put the book on hold at your library and check it out. I always say, “If you check it out, the library might buy more copies,” and works just as well.
Laura Sims: That’s right. It’s great. Put The Man on hold.
Steve Thomas: Thank you so much, Laura.
Laura Sims: You’re welcome. Thank you.
*****
Speaker: Let me tell you, listener, it is so much fun to talk to librarians on this show who have become authors. We can all do it, gang. We can all do it. Go write your books. Woo! Anyway, congrats, Laura, to making that jump. Maybe someday you’ll be able to write that psychological suspense novel for toddlers. Now let’s throw it over to the circ desk with Jamie and Suzanne
Jamie Langer: Hello, and welcome back to The Circ Desk. I’m Jamie Langer, and I’m a NoveList librarian. I do cataloging for our NoveList databases, primarily adult and teen materials, and I also curate the science fiction and fantasy Next Reads newsletter.
Suzanne Temple: And I’m Suzanne Temple, also a NoveList librarian. I mostly catalog juvenile materials and graphic novels for our NoveList databases. I also write audiobook and graphic novel reviews for Booklist.
Jamie Langer: All right, and we’ve just finished listening to Steve talk with author Laura Sims, so we want to share some readalike options for The Man. Suzanne, would you like to kick us off?
Suzanne Temple: Absolutely. I feel like my recommendations and reasonings will seem vague to those who haven’t read The Man yet, but I am desperately trying to avoid spoilers, so here goes.
My first recommendation is Hannah Beer’s debut novel, novel, I Make My Own Fun from 2025. Contemptuous Marina is a celebrity, and as a result, she’s gotten used to a certain amount of attention after years in the spotlight. Marina has a one-night stand with bartender Anna, but as Anna remains uninterested in maintaining a relationship with her, Marina becomes obsessed with making Anna recognize her greatness.
So as I was reading The Man, one thing that stood out to me was Paul’s ego, and so I looked for other books with the genre psychological suspense and the subject heading egotism. As I looked at the other subject headings for I Make My Own Fun, obsession and resentfulness stood out to me as things that would ratchet up that feeling of unease. I also looked for a title that had a sinister mood to it, so while The Man has the appeals creepy and disturbing, I felt like this title’s appeal, menacing, played well with those. Another thing that stood out to me from reading The Man was a sense of ambiguity about the events that take place. So while no character in The Man has been labeled as an unreliable narrator, this book’s use of that appeal term makes it a good match.
My second recommendation is the 2022 novel Nobody But Us by Laure Van Rensburg. Professor Stephen and grad student Ellie travel to a remote cabin for a romantic getaway. They look forward to getting more closely acquainted away from the nosy people at NYU. Unfortunately, when a snowstorm leaves them stranded, they learn neither person has been entirely honest. Ellie seeks revenge against Stephen, and Stephen proves to be more dangerous than Ellie expected.
While the relationship between Judith and Paul in The Man is not romantic, the teacher-student relationship and the power that comes with it is a major theme. So I looked for titles that shared the subjects college teachers and teacher-student relationships. I didn’t focus on genre this time, but instead focused on the appeals, intricately plotted and suspenseful. There’s also a focus on the true nature of the characters in The Man and what you don’t see upon their initial introduction, so that appealed to me with Nobody But Us as well.
Jamie Langer: Awesome. Thank you. I was also looking at I Make My Own Fun when I was looking at my recommendations, so I’m glad you brought that one up.
My first recommendation is Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman from 2021. This is a dual narrative story, and our narrators are Richard, an art teacher at a school in 2013 Virginia, and Sean, a young boy in 1983. These two stories converge over a disturbing crime committed on Richard’s campus and the Satanic ritual abuse trials of the 1980s more colloquially known as the Satanic Panic. As things continue to unravel, Richard realizes that the lies of the past have a way of coming back, and this time someone is demanding retribution.
So this is an intricately plotted tale of psychological horror that is more partially set in the past with The Man, and it has a more violent tone given the nature of the Satanic Panic accusations. I was especially interested in capitalizing on the sense of paranoia present in The Man, as well as focusing on the multiple perspectives of Richard and Sean. I think that having the mixed POVs in a suspenseful novel helps to obfuscate the truth, and it draws readers into the narrative.
So when I was in NoveList Plus, I combined my search for our multiple perspectives appeal with the subject heading paranoia. I also added our disturbing tone appeal, as you mentioned earlier. Disturbing books get at the darker side of human nature, which is quite prevalent in psychological suspense or horror, and I wanted to make sure that my recommendation got at that personal sense of the horror of others that sometimes comes with these titles. In The Man, that horror comes from both the stalker that Judith is haunted by through her photography and the somewhat intense mentor-mentee relationship that she develops with Paul. And in Whisper Down the Lane, it’s from the events as they unfold in Richard’s life and in the way that people can quickly spiral into impulsive paranoia, the way that a lot of teachers and other officials did during the Satanic Panic.
My second recommendation is One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon, released in 2024. Jasmine and her family move into the Black planned community of Liberty, hoping to find like-minded, socially conscious people to put down roots with. However, most members of the community are less interested in striving for racial equality and more focused on the treatments offered at the wellness center at the top of the hill. As more people embrace the Liberty lifestyle and her few friends become increasingly rattled, Jasmine uncovers more secrets about Liberty and realizes that paradise is never what it really seems. Along with being a narrative driven by a town with a hidden secret, this psychological suspense novel is also a character-driven story tackling themes of racial identity, trauma, and community.
For this recommendation, I wanted to hone more in on the suburban aspect of The Man. There’s been a lot of thriller and literary books written about suburbia and the family and neighbor dynamics that can sometimes curdle into hidden horror behind closed doors, as you never really know these people. We have a theme for this in NoveList that you can check out actually, called Suburban Malaise. Some familiar books like Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere fall under this theme. If you’re looking for more stories of average families bored and disenchanted with the supposed American dream, you can search for this theme in NoveList.
But back to One of Our Kind. When I was looking for titles, I wanted to try something a little more open with our appeals mixer, the terms that show up in the About This Book section of a record on NoveList. So I narrowed in on the suburban life subject heading, and I combined that with the intricately plotted appeal to find books that get more at the twists and turns that I think readers of The Man will be interested in.
That’s it for us today at The Circ Desk. We will check you out next time!
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