I wrote about Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop" for the Stylus Halloween special this week.
Where the Truth Lies, the new Atom Egoyan film, is an effective pulpy thriller that kept reminding me of the Luisa Rey sections in David Mitchell's postmodern novel Cloud Atlas: both Rey and Karen O'Connor are plucky young reporters in 1970s California who are carrying on their father's journalistic legacies and who find themselves caught up in the cover-up of a murder.
After reading reviews of Cloud Atlas, I was surprised to find the Rey story described by more than one critic as deliberately generic. To me it was the most captivating narrative in the whole novel -- although perhaps my surprise owes to the fact that I don't often read airplane paperbacks. (Maybe I should.) Where the Truth Lies has its hackneyed moments (cf. Alison Lohman's breathless voiceover about the murdered O'Flaherty girl living on as the tree in her mother's backyard), and Lohman isn't quite convincing as a hard-nosed go-getter (though she is appropriately vulnerable when the scene calls for it, and I maintain her essential prettiness) -- but it's creepily entertaining nonetheless.