Johanna Pearson, Bright and Tender Dark, with Alison Hart

For readers of Notes on an Execution and I Have Some Questions for You, a wire-taut literary debut about a murder on a college campus and its aftermath twenty years later.
Days after the dawn of Y2K, beautiful, charismatic nineteen-year-old Karlie Richards is found brutally murdered in her campus apartment. Two decades later, those who knew Karlie-and those who just knew of her-remain consumed by her death. Among them is her freshman year roommate, Joy, now middle-aged and mid-divorce, living in the same college town and desperate for a new beginning. When she stumbles upon a twenty-year-old letter from Karlie, Joy becomes convinced the man in prison for her murder was wrongfully convicted. Soon she is diving deep into the dark world of internet conspiracy theorists and amateur sleuth blogs and bouncing off others touched by the long, sensational aftermath of this crime. They include KC, the trans night manager at the building where Karlie was killed; Sheri, the mother of the man serving time; and Jacob Hendrix, the charming professor with whom, Joy knows all too well, Karlie was romantically entangled before her death.

Jumping between 2019 and 1999, Bright and Tender Dark takes us from the era of Reddit threads and online obsession to the evangelism-infused culture of the late ’90s to reveal what really happened to Karlie. It is a compulsively readable, prismatic literary debut that brilliantly mines the mythology of murder, the power of urban legend, and the psychological urge to both protect and exploit what you love but cannot have.

Joanna Pearson’s debut novel, Bright and Tender Dark, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury on June 4, 2024. Her second story collection, Now You Know It All was chosen by Edward P. Jones for the 2021 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and named a finalist for the Virginia Literary Awards. Her first story collection, Every Human Love was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, and the Foreword INDIES Awards. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery and Suspense, The Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and many other places. Joanna has received grants/fellowships as a fiction writer from MacDowell, VCCA, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the North Carolina Arts Council/Durham Arts Council. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and an MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Originally from western North Carolina, she now lives with her husband and two daughters near Chapel Hill, where she works as a psychiatrist.

Alison B. Hart is the author of The Work Wife and April May June July. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, Joyland Magazine, Literary Hub, The Missouri Review, and The Millions, among others. She co-founded the long-running reading series at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn and received her MFA from The New School. Raised in Los Angeles, she now lives in North Carolina with her family.