Murder and art intersect in Christopher Bollen’s “Orient.”
Out this week, this literary thriller is set in the North Fork hamlet Bollen stayed in while finishing his first novel.
“I remember feeling that first day as if I had found such a rare pocket of warmth and peace,” he tells The Post. “Then the night crept in. The darkness was so thick, it swallowed the house — and me — and what seemed like a charming clapboard interior began to take on haunted dimensions. Every noise in the bushes frightened me — made worse by the sudden, eerie lack of noise . . . When morning came, there it all was again, the beauty and innocence. I think that sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde psychology was an early instigator of the novel.”
Here are four books Bollen loves:
The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
Reading this diary is like sneaking into the home of a mysterious neighbor and opening their keepsake drawer. Almost every entry begins “Today I . . .” and the thrill is where Julavits takes us: binge-watching “The Bachelor,” receiving an email from eBay, overhearing a fight on the street. She turns these quotidian events into poignant, hilarious meditations.
The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
Lately I’ve been Greene-obsessed, and this is one of his most thrilling and unconventional. It starts with a case of mistaken identity and ends with the protagonist caught in a web of international intrigue. But Greene blows the narrative wide open with a spell of amnesia that rivals anything considered “postmodernist.”
Unnatural Causes by P.D. James
I bought this right after James’ death in November. It’s a wicked novel: a mystery writer washes up in a dinghy with his hands cut off, and Adam Dalgliesh, James’ poet-detective, begins investigating. You have to love a novelist who can conceive of a page-turning plot and also manage first-rate prose.
After the Tall Timber by Renata Adler
Like other bookish New Yorkers, I was smitten with Adler’s two novels, “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark.” After some digging, I discovered her five decades of journalism, where she covered everything from the narrative arc of soap operas to the war in Biafra. This collection is essential reading: red meat instead of the fat we’ve consumed for too long.