The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

Overview

BOLO Top Read of 2017

PopSugar Best Book of 2017

From the Edgar Award-nominated author of Shovel Ready, a blistering new thriller that Dennis Lehane calls “propulsive and meaningful”

For fans of Cormac McCarthy, Jim Thompson, the Coen Brothers, and Lost

Imagine a place populated by criminals—people plucked from their lives, with their memories altered, who’ve been granted new identities and a second chance. Welcome to The Blinds, a dusty town in rural Texas populated by misfits who don’t know if they’ve perpetrated a crime or just witnessed one. What’s clear to them is that if they leave, they will end up dead.

     For eight years, Sheriff Calvin Cooper has kept an uneasy peace—but after a suicide and a murder in quick succession, the town’s residents revolt. Cooper has his own secrets to protect, so when his new deputy starts digging, he needs to keep one step ahead of her—and the mysterious outsiders who threaten to tear the whole place down. The more he learns, the more the hard truth is revealed: The Blinds is no sleepy hideaway. It’s simmering with violence and deception, aching heartbreak and dark betrayals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062661364
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/19/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	313
Sales rank:	295,263
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Adam Sternbergh is New York magazine’s culture editor, as well as the author of the Edgar Award–nominated novels Shovel Ready and Near Enemy. He lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

Practically by design, novelists are people who honor the feelings and behaviors that connect us. But few things make them more skeptical than a community. The just-so surfaces of suburbia were a favorite target in postwar American fiction, from Peyton Place to "The Lottery" to the Rabbit novels. A small castle can be constructed out of novels satirizing the degradations of Marxist central planning. Postapocalyptic novels from YA (The Hunger Games) to literary fiction (Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea) reveal the folly of attempts to maintain order amid social chaos. Utopian societies? The only way those succeed is as a story prompt. T. C. Boyle (Drop City) and Lauren Groff (Arcadia) have set novels in such places only to collapse them, turn them into hubristic symbols of our inability to keep our reckless selves in check.

Adam Sternbergh feels no differently. But the neat trick of his third novel, The Blinds, is that he builds a smart, pulpy crime novel out of that material -- it's a critique of our best-intentioned it- takes-a-village sentiments that's both more realistic and more weaponized than similar treatments. Calvin Cooper is the ad hoc sheriff in a West Texas community called the Blinds, founded by a well-funded institute that's experimenting in erasing memories. Criminals and those who've suffered traumas have the uglier proteins in their brains zapped; in exchange for not being stalked by their memories of the havoc they wreaked (or experienced) in the outside world, the seventy-odd residents must stay within the town limits. "You are not in jail. You are not in hell," a deputy explains to some new arrivals. "You are in Texas."

The premise of the Blinds is so intriguing that you don't dwell too much on that erasing-memories business, even though it's the most volatile material you can pick up at the Hubristic Tropes Store. Sternbergh helps his cause by treating the matter gently, at least at first. The people responsible for doing the erasing are at a distance, genially described as "head scrubbers," and the official name for the Blinds is Caesura -- just a short pause, a tiny gap. Caesura is framed as an advanced version of the federal witness program, "a way to deal with . . . the killers, the serial rapists, the child predators, the ones who had knowledge and leverage." Besides, too much else is going on with the plot to consider ethical consequences too closely. The supposedly gun-free town has experienced two gun deaths in a matter of weeks; residents are chafing against the lack of information in their Internet-free haven; and one resident, Fran, has become understandably concerned for the safety of her eight-year-old son -- the only child in the Blinds.

"This is a fragile ecosystem we live in here," Calvin informs the town, and there's no clearer symbol of that fragility than Calvin himself, a lawman with no true authority except the trust he's been given, and which is rapidly eroding. That fragility is also clear in the fake names that residents are forced to take as soon as they arrive, pulling one name from a list of old-school movie stars and another from a list of vice presidents. This gives reading The Blinds the pleasurable sense that its characters are populating a Turner Classic Movies marathon -- Spiro Mitchum, Fran Adams, Hubert Gable, Hannibal Cagney. But the names are veneers. In time, it's clear that the stories the residents are hiding are so brutal that they can't help but force themselves to the surface. And Sternbergh isn't polite about shocking us out of our hope for the community. How do you feel about animals set on fire? Or mass murder? (One resident, it turns out, was a gangster nicknamed "Costco," because "he liked to kill in bulk.")

Grand Guignol gestures like those are easier to swallow than the convoluted path Fran takes to learn the truth about the Blinds and her son. (It involves a tattoo and likely the only time in fiction or real life that a Susan Sontag book will be used to help solve a crime.) And the implications of the concept get a little messy in the telling in the closing chapters. Erasing memories: bad. OK. But recovering from that erasure, in The Blinds, can alternately endow you with newfound moral strength, resurface your old malevolence, or flood you with guilt. This range of behaviors might seem to speak to our messy humanity, too, if they didn't seem like matters of plot mechanics, a way to ensure the appropriate person gets saved and/or gets a claw hammer lodged in their noggin.

But Sternbergh sells the basic point: We mess with our psyches at our peril, and one way we mess with our psyches is persuading ourselves that we're just a few regulations away from maintaining order. "The minds of the guilty . . . are endlessly fascinating, once you really roll up your sleeves," Sternbergh writes. Guilty of crimes, he means, but there are so many other kinds of guilt a novelist can play with, so many ways for a community to interestingly fail. Sternbergh may not even have to leave West Texas to keep exploring that idea. Every dystopian story, Margaret Atwood once wrote, ends with the suggestion of a possible utopia, and The Blinds closes with a reminder that the planned- community dream hasn't die. "They only face the same challenges of every new hopeful settlement that's ever been established in human history," he writes. It's a cautionary message. But it's a pretty good setup for a sequel, too.

Mark Athitakis is a writer, editor, critic, and blogger who’s spent more than a dozen years in journalism. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Chicago Sun-Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Washington City Paper, and many other publications. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.

Reviewer: Mark Athitakis

The Barnes & Noble Review

06/12/2017
Guilt, memory, and redemption swirl through this inventive science-fiction-based thriller from Edgar-finalist Sternbergh (Shovel Ready). In Caesura, an isolated Texas town that’s part penal colony, part rehabilitation experiment, Sheriff Calvin Cooper keeps the peace in a community that mixes the most savage of criminals with the victims of horrible crimes. What allows the two groups to coexist is that all their memories have been selectively edited to erase their recollections of their respective crime experiences. The fragile calm shatters when first one, then two residents are shot dead in a place where guns don’t officially exist. As the wider world intrudes, Cooper must handle new arrivals, work with the shadowy institute that has supplied the research and technology for memory editing, and defend his town against cynical outside forces that could burst the bubble that defines Cooper’s world. It’s a clever premise, but the many contrivances that support the plot don’t hold up as the novel moves briskly toward its conclusion, whose twists are telegraphed a little too clearly to preserve the element of surprise. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick Literary. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Eerie. . . . Sternbergh’s characters are intriguing, his plot is suspenseful and his outlook is endearingly dark. . . . Sternbergh is an original, grandly irreverent writer.” — Washington Post

“A thrilling Western unlike any you’ve read before.” — Vulture

“Expertly melds the thriller and the Western. . . . Truly original.” — Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers

“Crackles with noirish delights. . . . Sternbergh writes a beautiful sentence, even when the subject is mayhem, and he has a talent for lean, propulsive plotting.” — Newsweek

“Sternbergh shows again why he is one of the most inventive thriller writers working today.” — Booklist (starred review)

“A tense, broiling, 21st-century Western with a crafty premise.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The newest release from the riveting Adam Sternbergh.” — Popsugar

“A quick-paced story of crime and deception.” — Dallas Morning News

“[An] exciting new thriller. . . . This book doesn’t pull any punches.” — Bookish

“Guilt, memory, and redemption swirl through this inventive science fiction-based thriller.” — Publishers Weekly

“Adam Sternbergh is a genre-bender of the highest caliber. Part thriller, part Western, part pulpy whodunit, The Blinds is a propulsive and meaningful meditation on redemption and loss. It’s witty, electrifying, vivid, and thoroughly original.” — Dennis Lehane, author of Since We Fell

“The Blinds is brilliantly original. Fast-paced, ranging, and inventive, Adam Sternbergh’s restless imagination once again conjures characters and scenarios with heartbreaking insight, peril, and startling stakes. Readers take heed; this is a hell of a ride.” — Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek

“Adam Sternbergh tops my list of drop-everything-and-read novelists. With hints of Charles Willeford and Philip K. Dick, and rendered with achingly beautiful prose, The Blinds plucks the strings of Sternbergh’s favored themes-identity, loss, meta-reality-creating a symphony of noirish grit and improbable grace.” — Gregg Hurwitz, author of The Nowhere Man

“The Blinds is a wild, fever-dream of a novel. Posing questions about the power-and peril-of running from the past, Sternbergh’s vivid vision and the people he brings to life will haunt you long after you turn the shocking final pages.” — Julia Dahl, author of Invisible City and Conviction

From the Publisher

Sternbergh shows again why he is one of the most inventive thriller writers working today.

Booklist (starred review)

Expertly melds the thriller and the Western. . . . Truly original.

Lisa Ko

A thrilling Western unlike any you’ve read before.

Vulture

Crackles with noirish delights. . . . Sternbergh writes a beautiful sentence, even when the subject is mayhem, and he has a talent for lean, propulsive plotting.

Newsweek

The newest release from the riveting Adam Sternbergh.

Popsugar

Eerie. . . . Sternbergh’s characters are intriguing, his plot is suspenseful and his outlook is endearingly dark. . . . Sternbergh is an original, grandly irreverent writer.

Washington Post

A quick-paced story of crime and deception.

Dallas Morning News

[An] exciting new thriller. . . . This book doesn’t pull any punches.

Bookish

The Blinds is a wild, fever-dream of a novel. Posing questions about the power-and peril-of running from the past, Sternbergh’s vivid vision and the people he brings to life will haunt you long after you turn the shocking final pages.

Julia Dahl

Adam Sternbergh is a genre-bender of the highest caliber. Part thriller, part Western, part pulpy whodunit, The Blinds is a propulsive and meaningful meditation on redemption and loss. It’s witty, electrifying, vivid, and thoroughly original.

Dennis Lehane

The Blinds is brilliantly original. Fast-paced, ranging, and inventive, Adam Sternbergh’s restless imagination once again conjures characters and scenarios with heartbreaking insight, peril, and startling stakes. Readers take heed; this is a hell of a ride.

Smith Henderson

Adam Sternbergh tops my list of drop-everything-and-read novelists. With hints of Charles Willeford and Philip K. Dick, and rendered with achingly beautiful prose, The Blinds plucks the strings of Sternbergh’s favored themes-identity, loss, meta-reality-creating a symphony of noirish grit and improbable grace.

Gregg Hurwitz

Crackles with noirish delights. . . . Sternbergh writes a beautiful sentence, even when the subject is mayhem, and he has a talent for lean, propulsive plotting.

Newsweek

Eerie. . . . Sternbergh’s characters are intriguing, his plot is suspenseful and his outlook is endearingly dark. . . . Sternbergh is an original, grandly irreverent writer.

Washington Post

Eerie. . . . Sternbergh’s characters are intriguing, his plot is suspenseful and his outlook is endearingly dark. . . . Sternbergh is an original, grandly irreverent writer.

Washington Post

Sternbergh shows again why he is one of the most inventive thriller writers working today.

Booklist (starred review)

Crackles with noirish delights. . . . Sternbergh writes a beautiful sentence, even when the subject is mayhem, and he has a talent for lean, propulsive plotting.

Newsweek

A quick-paced story of crime and deception.

Dallas Morning News

The newest release from the riveting Adam Sternbergh.

Popsugar

A thrilling Western unlike any you’ve read before.

Vulture

[An] exciting new thriller. . . . This book doesn’t pull any punches.

Bookish

Expertly melds the thriller and the Western. . . . Truly original.

Associated Press Staff

07/01/2017
Cal Cooper is the sheriff of the small Texas town of Caesura. Except his real name isn't Cal Cooper, and everyone calls the town the Blinds. Cal doesn't know his real name, and neither do any of the other 50-odd people in town. They are all the result of a new procedure that can erase specific memories, and the government has found this to be useful for both criminals who have a made a deal and witnesses who would be in danger out in the world. It's the next generation of witness protection; if you don't know what it is that makes you dangerous, you can't reveal it and give yourself away. Things in the Blinds are quiet until the suicide and then murder. Cal and his deputies have to investigate a crime where anyone might have a motive and the skills to carry it out. The arrivals of agents from the outside with their own agenda add to the complexity and peril. VERDICT Fans of Sternbergh's earlier works (Shovel Ready; Near Enemy) will enjoy this story's clever premise, complex characters, and fast pace. Readers looking for a different kind of thriller with many twists and an explosive climax will also find much to relish. [See Prepub Alert, 2/20/17.]—Dan Forrest, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green

Library Journal

★ 2017-05-15
A tense, broiling, 21st-century Western with a crafty premise and a gruesomely high body count.Imagine HBO's Westworld, only without androids and taking place far closer to our own era, and you basically have the setting of this bleak-yet-antic prairie-noir novel by Sternbergh (Near Enemy, 2015, etc.). Somewhere in the most isolated reaches of the Texas Panhandle is the tiny, hardscrabble town of Caesura ("rhymes with tempura"), the population of which consists entirely of transplanted criminals who have not only been given new identities, but have had the memories of whatever they did to be relocated totally erased. It's part of an experimental program in behavior modification, and the community's got some pretty peculiar rules, one being that the residents' new names are compounds of movie stars and U.S. vice presidents. Examples include Spiro Mitchum, Greta Fillmore, Buster Ford, and Hubert Gable, the last of whom is the second resident within a week to have been found shot dead. Gable was killed in an apparent bar fight while the first death was an apparent suicide. Because these are the first such deaths in the town's eight-year history, it's become a priority puzzler for sheriff Calvin Cooper (yep, another alias) and his deputies, one of whom, a bright young woman named Dawes, thinks she knows where to look for a connection. Meanwhile, the parched stillness of what many of its residents call the Blinds is soon shattered by more than just errant gunfire; black vans carrying people with suits, dark glasses, and firearms appear, and the new arrivals start asking questions of their own that may have something to do with Calvin's good friend Fran Adams and her young son, Isaac. Two things are clear: nobody in this story is who they're supposed to be, and their secrets carry a high cost. Every time the reader thinks this story's turning right, it takes a hard left. But it never wanders in circles, and it does move like a championship stock car toward a climax that, however shattering, implies there's more to come.

Kirkus Reviews