Dear readers, In most areas of my life, I am all for cultivating a cooperative spirit. The compost bins my building’s super wheeled into our courtyard were reason to cheer. Few experiences are as narcotic as sitting among the fans at Citi Field when the Mets pull off a two-run double. I could go on. But I’m skeptical about the role of cooperation in an enterprise as dank and messy as writing a novel. So I was interested to learn that Evelyn Clarke, whose debut book is out today, is actually a pen name encompassing two writers: V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke. Their love of literary mysteries, our reviewer says, “infuses every page” of this co-written whodunit. The premise of “The Ending Writes Itself” is a “Clue”-lover’s dream. A thriller writer invites seven writers of genre fiction — romance, young adult, sci-fi and the like — to his island off the coast of Scotland. Once they sign the required N.D.A.s (perhaps the first sign that something is amiss?) they learn that their alleged host is dead, and each writer has three days to come up with an ending for his final work. There’s a good deal of publishing satire sprinkled throughout, which might elude readers who are disconnected from the industry. Let’s hope it was a healthy and goofy way for Schwab and Clarke to vent various frustrations about being pigeonholed. I’ll close on a truly genre-confounding note, courtesy of a best-selling Polish novel that our reviewer described as a “post-porn fever dream of Eastern European magic realism crossed with a plant-based ‘Joy of Sex.’” I couldn’t write an ending to that novel no matter how hard I tried. See you on Friday.
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