This debut novel from Manuel Munoz is teeming with scorching hot imagery and skilful narrative, all woven together into a thrilling, atmospheric story.</p>
Set in the hot, dusty city of Bakersfield, the residents are tantalised by the flash and glamour of nearby LA, yet kept forever distant from it as they struggle to make ends meet in the local diners, motels, and shops. </p>
Hollywood glamour finally smiles on them when Hitchcock swoops into town with his entourage, scouting for locations in filming <i>Psycho</i>. </p>
The waitresses in the local diner stare at the shimmering Janet Leigh as she picks at a delicate lunch in her astonishingly yellow silk blouse and smooth skirt. <i>Is it really her?</i> they whisper.</p>
One of the waitresse is Arlene. She’s middle-aged and weary of her life. Abandoned by her husband and left to manage their struggling motel, whilst spending her days pouring coffee behind the fly-spattered windows of the diner, has worn her spirit thin. </p>
Into her tired life come the Hollywood film crew, trailing their stardust.  How Arlene wishes for a life out of the humdrum, just as Janet Leigh, sipping her coffee, longs for acknowledgement and respect in this new Hitchcock film, a film where she must parade naked and is soon killed off.  A gamble, but how she hopes it will work.</p>
Alongside the longings of these two women we have Teresa, a poor Mexican girl who works in the shoe shop  before going home alone to her prim, one-room apartment.  She wants something too: to be a singer, to throw her arms wide to an audience, in a floor-length gown, with a voice which speaks of pain and love. But she has never experienced love. So, she tempts it into her life, thereby triggering the story, and the terrible murder which occurs. </p>
The stories of these three women, and their private desperations, are threaded together through the novel, all the while illuminated by hot imagery which brings us the parched air and the sun-scorch on our arms. </p>
Alongside this is the recurring motif of darkness – darkness in the cinema, darkness in Teresa’s stairwell, darkness in the abandoned motel - which neatly alerts us to the ugliness lurking beneath the Hollywood illusion, and the futility in hoping for such an illusion.</p>
Despite being a debut novel, Munoz has the confidence and skill to make brave narrative leaps. He opens the novel with a second-person narrative, so that <i>you</i> are taken by the wrist and hauled into the smoulder of the story. He then moves effortlessly between the thoughts and stories of his three women, plus Hitchock himself.</p> 
This bold approach works perfectly and when you close the book you need to shake yourself, realising you’re in rainy Britain and not in the fierce California heat.</p>
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<i>What You See In The Dark</i> is published by Duckworth
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