Chuck Bowen, Slant

Three male and three female protagonists (De Palma, a former engineering student, values such symmetry) are sent by their hungers and ambitions on an elaborate collision course against the backdrops of heavily mythologized, movie-ready cities such as D.C., Paris, and Vegas. Barton Brock is a manager-slash-fixer for Lee Rogers, a Republican senator up for re-election who hires as an intern 18-year-old Fanny Cours, the daughter of one of Lee’s former conquests. Also mixed up in this inevitable sexual melee is Elizabeth Diamond, the trophy wife of a rich art collector, and Nick Sculley, an aspiring photographer who, like John Travolta’s character in Blow Out, requires a bit of real-life tragedy to inform his art with meaning.

The fun of the book springs from its abject, unapologetic horniness, which is more distinctive in our timid times now than it was in De Palma’s heyday, and from attempting to figure out which formula it’s going to settle into. (Short answer: several at once.) Much of the novel is devoted to these characters hanging out and discussing status and strategy, so that De Palma and Lehman may note their designer apparel and particularly their varyingly terrific bodies. (Fanny is said to be in the “full flush of carnality” and there are sentiments offered about the bodies of French women, bedroom voices, and the fit of white T-shirts on young, cut men, among other things.) Though there’s a consistent amount of sex here, the book still feels like an act of extended foreplay, as we’re conditioned by De Palma thrillers to await the violence that goes with the carnality. The climax atop the Eiffel Tower and its resolution ingeniously pay off the various story strands, offering a tragedy and its inadvertent avengement.

Still, Are Snakes Necessary? also illustrates the limitations of attempting to recapture the visceral qualities of cinema via prose. De Palma and Lehman’s writing is confident, but it still only faintly conjures the wrenching, surreal power of a classic De Palma sequence, whether it’s the prom scene in Carrie or the anguished murder in front of a Fourth of July fireworks display in Blow Out. The Eiffel tower sequence in Are Snakes Necessary?, with its vicious, mathematical toggling between various parties as they hurtle toward violence, is clearly meant to suggest one of De Palma’s greatest hits (the authors even specify which part of action is meant to be seen in slow motion), but the poetry is missing. De Palma is a maestro of juxtaposition, composition, and performance calibration, not of words on a page.

Though there’s fun in figuring out which of De Palma’s staple of actors might have played each role in Are Snakes Necessary?—Brock is the Gregg Henry character, Fanny is Nancy Allen, and so forth—on the page these characters are just mice being moved through a narrative contraption. Without De Palma’s stylistic gamesmanship, without the poignant, daring melodrama of the director’s preferred style of acting, the personality and obsessiveness of De Palma’s worldview is compromised. Are Snakes Necessary? offers a fascinating glimpse, then, as to how a script for a director is fleshed out by the other stages of a film’s creation. The book is a serviceable, even compulsive page-turner, but it could be a hell of a movie.

The writing style of the novel comes directly from De Palma’s film background; sparse, quick-moving prose, present tense delivery, brilliant descriptors that are an evocative shorthand for what is going on in a character’s mind. It almost reads like a screenplay, but that pacing and near-abrupt style adds to the noir feel.

And this is a noir novel, all the way through. It is filled with femme fatales, rogues and scoundrels, shadowy fixers and a somewhat jaded outlook. Despite all that, it walks the line between too much and too little admirably, refusing to take itself too seriously, and managing to steer shy of being too camp.

Part of what keeps it from veering into the too-camp territory is the plot, which is a truly stunning series of masterstrokes. Without spoilers, this novel manages to wrap together several increasingly disparate plots in several surprising, satisfying ways. Needing to know what happens next in the crazy rollercoaster of events kept me turning pages without putting the book down even once; I sat down and read this from cover to cover in one sitting.

From the way that it freely mixes numerous political scandals in the manner that the JFK assassination and Chappaquiddick helped to inspire his 1981 masterpiece “Blow Out,” to the use of favorite narrative tropes and numerous cinematic allusions (even the title is a vaguely obscure reference to a book that Henry Fonda was reading in “The Lady Eve”) throughout, Are Snakes Necessary? is so obviously a De Palma creation, one in the vein of such original works as “Dressed to Kill,” “Blow Out” and “Femme Fatale” that if it had been published under a pseudonym, readers versed in his work would have figured out who wrote it in an instant. Fans will no doubt relish all the things in it that they have come to know and love from his films—the caustic, cynical wit, the audacious storytelling, and a wild finale that practically unfolds in slow-motion on the page, in the best possible way.

Those not as enthralled by De Palma’s legacy may be a little more suspicious of a book written by a filmmaker who is primarily renowned for his visual style and whose plots have not always held up to scrutiny from a logical or dramatic standpoint. Yes, there are a couple of points when the cheerfully pulpy prose gets a little too purple for its own good—at one point, Fanny’s breasts are parenthetically described as “(firm, peach shape),” which is pushing it even for a character already named Fanny—and there a couple of instances where the book seems to be drifting into Elmore Leonard territory, which one should probably avoid doing at all unless they are actually Elmore Leonard. And while politics are not exactly at the forefront of the story, some readers may be a bit disconcerted that a book based in that particular milieu would make absolutely no reference at all to what else was happening on the American political scene as a whole circa 2016.

For the most part, however, Are Snakes Necessary? is cleanly written, moves like a shot (most people will probably be able to read it in the same amount of time that it would have taken to watch it if it had been a movie) and does an effective job of recounting its alternately lurid and loony story. In fact, book's only real downside is the fact that De Palma presumably will not be making a movie version of it—a shame, because the climax could have easily gone down as one of the most eye-popping extended sequences of his entire career. This may prove to be nothing more than a lark in De Palma’s career, but it is nevertheless a hugely entertaining one.

Behind intelligent taste for absurdity is heightened awareness of reality. De Palma and Lehman give us a pitiful, medicated Parkinson’s sufferer who doesn’t know how to use a web browser, but they also give us Fanny, a senatorial intern of 18, who makes viral videos and says she believes in “truth.” Her political consciousness is entirely conditioned by social media, which is why she speaks of truth and not tactics (or justice). Politics, in De Palma’s view, is not truth or justice, but the interminable, confused pursuit of whatever can be made to resemble them. Fanny is aware of this but thinks she can surmount it; she sees and wants purity. This is not only youth but an effect of technology: she thinks her videos of the senator are the senator, beyond “spin”, beyond performance; what is filmed and said in private is more real than what is said and done in public. Writing a novel set in American politics, in 2020, risks the obvious, but De Palma is less interested in “Trump” or “nationalism” (the latter is depicted briefly and almost neutrally) than in a social media wizard such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; the novel sees the landscape, but not the one we were looking for.

De Palma and Lehman know that today’s teenagers spend whole weekends in their bedrooms, that daughters tell their mothers about their sex lives now, that young, intelligent men are as inept as ever around girls like Fanny. The novel, which is written plainly, can be sensuous—the visual De Palma has a good eye for clothes—but it is especially evocative in the experiences of women. There is tenderness in the book, and not only because someone is “tenderly” smothered. One woman muses on the married father of her unborn child, imagining all the ways she could tell him, and all the different results, some passionate, some cold; being pregnant is a secret that inspires one’s daydreams. Looking back on that scene years later, she remembers what she was wearing. She is “not the only woman who vividly remembers” such things when looking back on a great moment. This is touching, if a little broad, but later in the book the authors turn it inside out, when they show a different, more pathetic woman try to remember the same and fail.

When women are attracted to men in this book, they acknowledge their feelings with articulate reasons, while the men merely respond with their “animal center.” The reader is repeatedly struck by the coarseness of description—“nice ass,” “giant breasts”—when a man is doing the watching. But the men, when seen by women, have dual, mixed qualities—a “mix of dopey lines and seeming straightforwardness,” an “odd blend of total surprise and…awareness”—which make them ineluctably but mysteriously attractive. This clash of the sexes, when it is irresistible and not vexing, is cinematically caricatured in a moment approaching horror: a two-sided sex scene in which paragraphs alternate between male and female viewpoints. When the man thinks “how can I get her clothes off?” the woman, in her head, is saying “you are the love of my life.” And so on. It is funny, and it is sad, especially when it culminates in a woman’s desire for eye contact and a man’s desire for sex positions which happen to make eye contact difficult. It is De Palma at his raunchiest, but it is also deeply moral, as his raunchiest films have been.

The erotic thriller, as formulated by De Palma, has roots in screwball comedy as well as in noir. Dressed to Kill, Body Double, and Femme Fatale all end in coupling, not doom; the protagonists of these films share an ability to learn which is the province of comedy. In Body Double, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) is a claustrophobic, cuckolded method actor of the Lee Strasberg variety, in which memories are not only used but ostensibly relived. It’s a mode of passive self-obsession De Palma compares to pornography. But De Palma being De Palma, prudery is not an alternative: Jake only succeeds when instead of lazily watching porn he performs in it himself. His new comfort with artifice is freeing in its falseness: truth was an obstacle; purity doesn’t exist; “body doubles” are everywhere. The ability to act freely is highly related to one’s capacity to tell lies, and, it follows, one’s willingness to forgive them. De Palma’s morality is summed up by Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941), the film from which Are Snakes Necessary? takes its title: “The best girls aren’t as good as you think they are”, she says, “and the bad ones aren’t as bad…not nearly as bad.”

Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn) of Femme Fatale watches a different Stanwyck movie at the start of that film, but by the end of the film, she could be watching The Lady Eve. Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944) is as bad as a virginal Henry Fonda thought she was in The Lady Eve. Laure may want to be as bad as that, to be able to say to someone’s face that “I never loved you or anyone else”, but her own humanity gets in the way. As Stanwyck’s does in The Lady Eve, who looks doubtfully downward in her moment of triumph. The femme fatale of screwball comedy can cry and sometimes mean it, she can regret the revenge she exactingly planned, and yet she can enter into a marriage with her cunning intact: she is cruel for the sake of love, not the other way around. Elizabeth of Are Snakes Necessary? is a femme fatale in training, an autodidact of her own allure. The question of the book, the force of its dilemma to the extent it is asked, is which version of Stanwyck she will choose to become.

The book is at its best when she is feeling her way towards a sexier, cleverer, chillier self. She has natural good taste: she knows from the beginning that “it’s the flash of skin”—not the bare skin itself—that is the pivot of desire; her knowledge that “the point where the conceal and reveal join…is most interesting” is something she shares with De Palma the director. Still, the authors admit, Elizabeth, whose laugh is like “wild poppies,” doesn’t quite know what she’s doing. She thinks flirtation, for example, is a matter of willpower: “does the woman want to go through with it or not?” is the only relevant question. The fate of a femme fatale is to a great extent determined by the men she encounters, and there are no men in this world who might find her routine of “giggle…smile…kiss the boy” tiresome. Nick, her first mark, lets strange women kiss him, pretends to smoke cigarettes, and is proud of his preference for eating peach yogurt: he has little self-awareness and great self-regard. When such a man tells a woman that he’ll be “very good at undressing” her, the fact that he had to say it makes him a pearl in her necklace.

Nick has had a brush with fame, a single photograph that went viral; this does not, impressively, do much for Elizabeth: she prefers “planning and artistry” to the outcomes of chance, another instance of good taste which she shares with her author. But men are not movies, and sex is not something one simply accedes to: desirous she may be, but she is not overwhelmed. And neither is De Palma: there is a great deal of chance in the workings of desire. When a man and woman kiss in this book, “it nearly knocks them out”, but like the boasting of Nick, this is stated as mere fact; the reader is shut out from the feeling and left fully awake. At one point the authors describe sex as “a world far from conversation”, as if talk were not arousing—real talk, not the humouring of a vain man. It may be a reflection of the characters in question, as much of the narration is, but it is too easy in such moments to imagine De Palma’s camera roving and taking over, embellishing the supposed defects of speech with the nimble grace of a deed.

If anything, the flaws of the book suggest the greatness of his films: Brian De Palma is the most musical filmmaker of our time, as audial as he is visual. In a certain sense, the great director he resembles is not Hitchcock but Stanley Donen, who crafted sequences so musical and ecstatic that whatever surrounds them can seem uninspired. Even the experience of watching Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is one of patiently waiting for the drama to stop, for the next extended thrill to descend. And so it is with the ballet sequence of Passion (2012), the overture to Femme Fatale, the finale of Mission to Mars (2000); nothing can top him when he lets himself sing. It is the musician’s fate to be bored with or hate an unmusical world: there is sad vexation in the best of De Palma, and it is there in this book. He treats drama the way Scottie treated Judy in Vertigo (1958): with a certain obliging menace, a friendly unfairness borne of high expectations, a hope that for even mere seconds or minutes the promise of beauty might be more than just haunting.

WAS ORIGINALLY GOING TO APPEAR IN PERSON TO SIGN BOOKS & PRESENT 2 FILMS THAT NIGHT - QUINE'S 'PUSHOVER' AND DE PALMA'S OWN 'FEMME FATALE'


UPDATE 3/14/2020 - The Metrograph appears to be in the process of canceling all screenings at the theater after March 18, which includes the sceenings mentioned in this post.

UPDATE 3/11/2020 -  The Metrograph page for this event now reads, "De Palma will no longer appear in person."

Original Post from 3/8/2020 - Brian De Palma will spend a Saturday night at The Metrograph in New York City March 21st. He'll be signing copies of Are Snakes Necessary? And he will also present two films: Richard Quine's Pushover (1954), and De Palma's own Femme Fatale (2002), the latter a Metrograph favorite. The choice of Pushover is interesting, as it featured the film debut of Kim Novak, who, of course, would go on to star with James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, the 1958 film that sparked De Palma's interest in cinema. Stewart and Novak teamed up again in 1958 for another Richard Quine film, Bell, Book and Candle, which was a big hit at the box office. Meanwhile, Novak's co-star in Quine's Pushover, Fred MacMurray, had already starred with Barbara Stanwyck in another De Palma favorite, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), which is playing on a hotel television in the opening shot of De Palma's Femme Fatale. When you consider that Are Snakes Necessary? includes a film crew in France who are making their own version of Vertigo, there is sure to be some fascinating intertextual discussion March 21st at the Metrograph.

Here's the Metrograph description of the event:

BRIAN DE PALMA IN PERSON
March 21

Brian De Palma has been an independent cinephile filmmaker emerging from the politically and aesthetically radical 1960’s counterculture of New York City. He has been a director of scrappy, ingenious low-budget genre fare, and he has been an unmistakably personal studio auteur putting the entire mechanism of industrial filmmaking towards creating big, bold, and sui generis thrillers. He survived being perhaps the most excoriated of New Hollywood’s Young Turks, and has become among the most venerated of its Old Masters.

And now he is adding another accomplishment to his astonishing CV—the author of literary fiction. At Metrograph for the release of his debut novel, the political satire Are Snakes Necessary?, co-written with Susan Lehman and published by Hard Case Crime, De Palma will also present one of his own films and an old favorite, as a reassurance he hasn’t left the cinema behind entirely.

C.J. Bunce, borg

The modern pulp noir follows intersecting characters in a smarmy world of cheating, lying, and murder, from Las Vegas to Washington to Paris.

A senator and his majordomo encounter a woman from the senator’s past at an airport, and the senator is eager to welcome her daughter as an intern to document his campaign. Meanwhile, a struggling photographer gets mixed up with the trophy wife of a wealthy businessman in Las Vegas. Two married couples–a cheating wife and a cheating husband–the wife a victim of spousal abuse seeking to get out, and a politician with a sick wife staking out his next conquest. And somehow they all come together during a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, based more toward the underlying novel, which was set in France (I reviewed the novel a few weeks ago here at borg).

In a way Are Snakes Necessary? is De Palma taking a stab at doing his own play on Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski. Fans of The Girl on the Train, Chinatown, State of Play, and the sleazier shelf of 1970s era pulp crime novels will go for this one, along with fans of De Palma’s films. More about 20th century sexual politics than 21st century sexual politics and less about a political campaign, the snakes in the title are the men who continue to get away with manipulation, lies, and sometimes murder.

The setting and players will be familiar to readers of Elmore Leonard–it’s the kind of pulp crime story where men are maulers and women only survive if they’re willing to kill–the kind of story De Palma or Tarentino would put on the big screen, along with the corresponding sex, language, and violence. Almost as an aside, the authors slip in a character something like Melanie in Leonard’s The Switch and Rum Punch, a woman fed-up with her lot who knows herself and finds her way into an off-the-wall revenge plot. The book also has that taste of so many airplane-based movies in the 1970s with those relationships tied to travel, like passengers flirting, something that hasn’t been a go-to plot element for a while.

Are Snakes Necessary? is full of highs and lows–highs in its surprises, lows in its overall familiar tropes of the genre. Tightly written, the story may also seem a bit thin and straightforward, although the authors pack a handful of twists into their tale, including a vivid climactic sequence at the Eiffel Tower clearly written for the screen, which may justify a read all by itself. The authors reveal the scene via a photographer that plays out like a zoetrope–a really nice effect. In fact the entire novel feels like it could have been a screenplay adapted into novel form.

De Palma and Lehman provide a nice brisk pace through what is a relatively short novel. And unfortunately, the short length may be the flaw that bothered me the most. The ending seems rushed, unsatisfactory in details, and is way too pat (there are twists I don’t wish to give away). However, there is a lot going on with all of the characters, and they seem fairly well-rounded.

Descriptions are at a minimum but still adequate. Dialogue is realistic. The two stories are strong but could have benefited from further fleshing out. Is it readable? Absolutely. Is it a classic? No. A good read for an airplane ride or your first day on the beach.

At the risk of sounding much like the introductory theme song to The Jetsons:

Meet Barton Brock, campaign manager for Senatorial candidate Jason Crump who's getting creamed in the primaries by incumbent Senator, Lee Rogers.

"Political campaigns are brutal. The stakes are high. Not for the electorate - Barton Brock does not particularly care for the electorate. But for the team that boosts the candidate into office, the stakes matter, a lot. The guys on the team get big payoffs, good appointments, cushy jobs, bigger campaigns.

It's a lot like fishing. You start small, then throw away the little guys, the ones self-respecting cats wouldn't call dinner - and then you cast out for the big mothers."

You like similes and metaphors? Lehman and De Palma are masters of the craft. Wait.

Meet Elizabeth DeCarlo, a 19 year old "drop-dead gorgeous blonde" working the counter of a McDonalds. Brock enlists her onto his staff to "conduct push polls" but he has an ulterior motive.

Meet Senator Rogers, incumbent Senator. He has an ailing wife and an historically out of control libido. He meets Elizabeth. In a hotel bar. After a successful primary victory. Just what Brock planned. But things don't turn out quite how he planned.

Meet Jenny Cours, Jenny is 47 and has been for many years, a flight attendant for Loft Air. She is a long-time ahem, friend of the Senator's and his aforementioned libido.

"Why do we never forget the ones that got away? Rogers quickens his pace. And, eyes trained on her ass, he catches up with Jenny Cours."

Meet Fanny Cours, Jenny's 18 year old daughter who is "in the full flush of carnality. Neither her vitality and ripeness nor the irrepressible sense of readiness that surrounds her elude the impatient senator." The college student is also a political junkie and a videographer who goes to work on Rogers' campaign much to her mother's distress.

Meet Nick Sculley, a one-time famous news photographer who's down on his luck and during a stopover in Vegas on his way to LA, he bumps into Elizabeth Diamond, nee DeCarlo, coming out of the Admiral's Club Lounge. He's as good looking as our old friend, Elizabeth. Coincidentally, they're taking the same flight to L.A.. They bond over Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, sit together and...

"Giggle. Smile. Kiss the boy. Watch him light up. Knowing how to speak to the animal in the man is half the game. The rest, Elizabeth finds, is really a matter of will."

Meet Bruce Diamond, Elizabeth's rich, casino-owning husband. Seven casinos rich.

"Diamond loves expensive cars, priceless paintings, beautiful women. He loves to throw money around. He's so full of himself and all of his big hungry qualities, he is near to bursting."

There we have the major dramatis personae. De Palma and Lehman have crafted a well-woven tale that could be closer to the truth than evident at first. Politics does make strange... well, you know. The perfunctory "names, character, places, etc." disclaimer appears on the copyright page. I bet it must have been written with a tongue in cheek. As you may guess, due to the authors involved, the novel is very cinematic. The characters come alive in your mind and you can see settings and scenes as if you were viewing this, not just reading it.

"A little conversation, with an old woman. Beats going through the motions of seduction with some guy out of Vegas who is genuinely confused as to whether the conversation is going to end up in bed or not. (Yes, mister, it is, why else do you think I'm listening to you prattle on about your golf game, the jazz that means more to you than anything in the world, the novel that will bring you fame and fortune and change the way the world thinks? Darling. This is the noise we make to fill up the time between here and the not so distant moment when we'll be naked animals grunting and moaning in a world far from conversation.)"

These are Elizabeth's thoughts as she rides on a bus, towards the next stage of her life as she sits and speaks with:

Meet Lucy Wideman, an elderly woman who has anonymously, for years, been the Boston Globe's advice columnist, Dear Dottie.

With this inventive, fast-paced page turner in your hands you will also be meeting your next fun and exciting read.

Writer Nick Kolakowski chimed in with a link to his review at Mystery Tribune, tweeting, "It really does win every single square of De Palma bingo, but I had some... issues with it."

To which Ayres replied, "It's... slight? But so pleasingly symmetrical."

Adlerberg then added, "It’s a little slight, I guess. And the writing style is a bit bare bones and screenplay like, but does that matter really? I like how tongue and cheek it is."

Here's an excerpt from Kolakowski's review at Mystery Tribune:

On the cover of “Are Snakes Necessary?”, the thriller authored by legendary director Brian De Palma (co-written with Susan Lehman), there’s a blurb that many a noir writer would commit literal murder for: Martin Scorsese announcing that this book is “like having a new Brian De Palma picture.”

As a blurb, it’s dead-on, and therein lies the rub: If you’re a fan of De Palma’s cinematic work, this book may very well scratch that itch for another thriller from the maestro, albeit in a totally different format. If you’re one of those folks who dislikes the director’s hothouse Hitchcock homages, then you’re no doubt going to roll your eyes as the book trots out pretty much every single De Palma trope of the past 45 years.

Psychosexual shenanigans? Check. Political malfeasance? Check. Unscrupulous people doing their level best to one-up each other? Check. Knife deaths? Check.

Hitchcock-style tumble from a really tall, internationally famous landmark? Oh yeah, big check. Not to spoil too much, but a climactic incident “happens in that funny slow-motion way that events unfold in the heat of certain moments,” to quote the narration directly.

It’s like De Palma is attempting to do in print what he’s done so notably in some of his most famous films (the train-station shootout in “The Untouchables,” the cross-action finale of “Raising Cain”); the paragraphs become individual shots, the action so clear you could storyboard it.

Indeed, if there’s one minor quibble to make with the book, it’s the pacing. Within chapters, the narrative will suddenly jump to that night, or even a few weeks later; it would work in a movie, where a single cut is all you need to seamlessly suggest that time has elapsed, but it’s jarring in prose.

For those who grew up watching, re-watching, and generally enjoying De Palma’s films, perhaps the biggest surprise here is the tone. His movies’ characters might be psychologically twisted wrecks, but De Palma always approached pacing, framing, and the other elements of filmmaking with a surgeon’s eye, expertly dialing in his effects. Yet the book’s tone is casual—“folksy” is probably the wrong word to use, but that term hints at its relaxed nature.

𝐖𝐞 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚 𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐝𝐮𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐂𝐎𝐕𝐈𝐃-𝟏𝟗, 𝐬𝐨 𝐚 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐮𝐩𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐮𝐬.

First and foremost, we're keeping our eyes on announcements from the CDC, WHO, and NYC Health to monitor how this all develops. We encourage everyone to follow those sources for the most up-to-date information.

Unless otherwise noted, scheduled events will proceed as planned. We won't be doing signing lines or photo ops to limit the amount of person-to-person interaction. At events, you'll receive a pre-signed copy of the book, so come prepared with lots of questions for the Q&A section so you can chat with your favorite author.

Reminder that in-store, the bathrooms are located on the second floor if you need to wash your hands. Store hours remain the same as always!

If you're staying home and happen to be reading through your TBR pile too quickly, fear not! You can order anything from the store online for delivery to your home from strandbooks.com.

We’ll continue to monitor the situation and keep you updated on how this all affects our programming.

Doors open 30 minutes before the start of the event.

"It's like having a new Brian De Palma picture." - Martin Scorsese, Academy Award-winning director

When the beautiful young videographer offered to join his campaign, Senator Lee Rogers should've known better. But saying no would have taken a stronger man than Rogers, with his ailing wife and his robust libido. Enter Barton Brock, the senator's fixer. He's already gotten rid of one troublesome young woman -- how hard could this new one turn out to be?

Pursued from Washington D.C. to the streets of Paris, 18-year-old Fanny Cours knows her reputation and budding career are on the line. But what she doesn't realize is that her life might be as well...

Join us in the Rare Book Room for the release of Are Snakes Necessary? with writers Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman.

Brian De Palma is the world-famous director of more than thirty films, including Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Blow Out, and the original Mission: Impossible. The subject of the 2015 documentary De Palma, he is considered one of the most accomplished filmmakers of the last fifty years, a peer to directors such as Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese and an inspiration to next-generation directors such as Quentin Tarantino.

Susan Lehman is a former editor of the New York Times and author whose writing has appeared in the Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The New Yorker, and Spy magazine. An attorney by training, she also served as communications director at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Are Snakes Necessary? is their first novel.

"New @HardCaseCrime in the house," LitReactor tweeted, "including Brian De Palma's fabulously titled, 'Are Snakes Necessary?'"

The novel, which Hard Case says "has been extensively revised" since the its original publication in France, has a street date of March 17, 2020.

The other two quotes on the Hard Case Crime page:

"Brilliant, lurid, twisty fun...compulsively readable and fiendishly constructed."
— David Koepp, screenwriter of Jurassic Park

"One of the world’s greatest filmmakers has helped produce a fast-moving page turner, breathlessly paced...irresistible for any De Palma fan."
— Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho

Here's the Hard Case Crime description:

FROM THE DIRECTOR OF SCARFACE AND DRESSED TO KILL—
A FEMALE REVENGE STORY

When the beautiful young videographer offered to join his campaign, Senator Lee Rogers should’ve known better. But saying no would have taken a stronger man than Rogers, with his ailing wife and his robust libido. Enter Barton Brock, the senator’s fixer. He’s already gotten rid of one troublesome young woman—how hard could this new one turn out to be?

Pursued from Washington D.C. to the streets of Paris, 18-year-old Fanny Cours knows her reputation and budding career are on the line. But what she doesn’t realize is that her life might be as well...