Joanna Pearson: Bright and Tender Dark | Bloomsbury Publishing; June 4
Much has changed in Chapel Hill and its centerpiece public university, over the years, but it can still feel frozen in time.
Cresting Franklin Street on my way to meet the writer Joanna Pearson, one recent morning, I spot an older woman kneeling by a row of sorority houses, trimming rose bushes; a block or so away, students with backpacks slung low over Carolina blue T-shirts mill in front of Sutton’s Drug Store. Farther still down the road, a man with dreads bound up in a red bandana crosses the street to Carrburritos.
The indelible feel of a college town is captured in Pearson’s debut novel, Bright and Tender Dark, a dense, variegated literary thriller about the Y2K-era murder of Karlie Richards, a college student who seems to dazzle everyone around her. The book begins from the perspective of Karlie’s freshman-year roommate, Joy, who recalls, in the opening paragraph, Karlie’s instructions for how to fend off an attacker: “Fall to the ground, froth at the mouth, growl, fling your arms, spout gibberish.”
This is a real conversation that Pearson, who grew up in Western North Carolina and graduated in 2002, remembers from her time at UNC-Chapel Hill.
“Even at this idealistic flagship university, girls were still trading tips like this,” Pearson recounts over coffee at Carrboro’s Weaver Street Market. The memory served as a starting point for Bright and Tender Dark, which was released this month by Bloomsbury Publishing.
It’s Pearson’s first novel, but she’s been writing steadily since her undergraduate creative writing days: After graduating UNC, she went on to pursue an MD from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, adding in a poetry MFA from Johns Hopkins along the way. Since then, she’s shifted from poetry to short fiction, authoring two award-winning short-story collections: Every Human Love (2019) and Now You Know It All (2021). Some of her stories have appeared in anthologies, including 2023’s Best American Short Stories; recently, she was awarded a grant from South Arts as part of its inaugural class of State Fellows for Literary Arts.
This novel is another excursion—this time into something longer—though, as Pearson puts it, “you can see the short story DNA in this book,” and that’s true. The writing is taut and self-contained, the energy of each scene spinning tightly on its own axis. Some chapters read as if they could stand on their own.
Set at UNC, Bright and Tender Dark deals with the long aftershocks of a campus murder. It begins in 2019, 20 years after the crime, when Joy discovers an unopened letter from Karlie that throws the murder (and subsequent conviction and imprisonment of a mentally disabled local man) into question. Other things, what Pearson calls “textual artifacts”—emails, true-crime Reddit forums, college papers—break up the narrative, which moves between the perspectives of numerous (too numerous, perhaps) other characters, seesawing between 1999 and 2019.
There’s Maggie, a real estate agent and the new wife of Joy’s ex-husband; KC, who works as the night shift manager at the off-campus building where the murder occurred; and Jacob Hendrix, the religious studies professor who was close—too close—with Karlie before her death. All are haunted, in one way or another: by the loss of Karlie, by religious repression, by the loss of the life they expected to live.
“I set out thinking this is gonna be a story about storytelling,” says Pearson. “I knew I wanted it to be polyvocal, a story about how we tell stories.”
Before falling under the spell of the philandering religious studies professor and entering a rebellion, Karlie begins her time at UNC a bright and dewy-eyed believer. She “collected lip glosses flavored like pineapple soda and endorsed books that argued godly young women should refrain from kissing anyone until their wedding day.” (This, as anyone familiar with early-aughts evangelical culture knows, is a reference to Joshua Harris’s popular courtship manual, I Kissed Dating Goodbye.)
In life Karlie is magnetic; in death, even more so. There’s nuance to the magnetism—she bears “an undeniable avarice,” “the great, gaping imperative that she be liked, preferred”—but it’s apparent how readily the conditions around her death turn her into something reified, like Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, haunting the generations after her.
In her 2018 essay collection Dead Girls: Essays On Surviving an American Obsession, the writer Alice Bolin tracks a dark genre that spans media from Pretty Little Liars to The Lovely Bones, and an obsession with murdered, silenced women. It’s a genre distinctly shaped by racism and misogyny (both fictional Dead Girls and their real-life counterparts that receive attention are pretty much always thin, white, and cisgender), with Bolin noting that these stories are driven by a “haunted, semi-sexual obsession” with “the highest sacrifice, the virgin martyr.”
They’re forms as one-dimensional as a cheerful woman in a mid-aughts Old Navy ad. Once you learn about Dead Girls, you’ll see them everywhere.
This framework is helpful for evaluating true-crime fiction (and how or whether it’s done responsibly), of course, though the mitigating factor here is that sometimes the crimes are true. The trope often offers space for dark topics that don’t always see the light of day: power, predation, domestic abuse. Dead Girls are real, violence against women endemic, the metal grip of a key between knuckles familiar.
And UNC-CH is haunted by its own campus tragedies. To name just a few: There’s the unsolved murder of Suellen Evans, a student taking summer classes at UNC who was stabbed in co*ker Arboretum in 1965 as she fought off a rapist. In 1970, James Cates, a young Black Chapel Hill resident, was stabbed to death in the UNC Pit by members of a white motorcycle gang when he attended a dance marathon event—a crime that’s largely been whitewashed from UNC history.
In 2008, student body president Eve Carson was murdered, followed just four years later by the 2012 murder of UNC sophom*ore Faith Hedgepeth, a member of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe. My own years at UNC were bookended by the tragic murders of Carson and Hedgepeth and the tension from the tragedies was palpable. The ripple effects of the fictional murder in Bright and Tender Dark feel authentic to those kinds of community-wide experiences, though Pearson is quick to note that she didn’t base the book on any real incidents.
Marya Spence, Pearson’s agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, wrote in an email that she appreciates the book for its “obsessive, spiraling exploration of predation” and “the anxiety of public identity; and our ultimate complicity in continuously feeding the spectacle of tragedy.”
By day, Pearson is a psychiatrist, and that’s maybe the most helpful detail for capturing what works so well about her writing. In an interview with UNC’s English and Comparative Literature, she spoke about the kinship between writing and psychiatry: “I also thought a lot about character [at UNC]—what people want, what motivates them, why they do what they do, their backstory—and language as a tool, both of which have turned out to be awfully relevant now to me as a psychiatrist.”
Pearson’s previous story collections, which largely circumnavigate the lives of North Carolina women, tread dark psychological water—menacing encounters, fundamentalist extremities, postpartum psychosis—and her professional expertise shines through in these sharp psychological portraits.
“I’m not a true-crime girlie,” Pearson says. “I have an appetite for mystery but not necessarily a capacity.”
Bright and Tender Dark isn’t a Tana French novel, and if you’re looking for a traditional thriller, you won’t find many such Gone Girl or Sharp Knives twists. Nevertheless, it’s a gripping read and Pearson’s observations—particularly about girlhood, social anxiety, and millennium-era evangelical culture—will stay with you for a long time, adhesive like sticky summer residue.
Bright and Tender Dark begins with the perspective of Joy, the freshman-year roommate whose disposition belies her name, and whose mind anchors the story. She’s not a protagonist you encounter very often—she’s middle-aged, divorced, and obsessive to the point of self-destruction, as she tries to reopen the case and tumbles into the online true-crime community—but Pearson’s insight into her character is keen and assured. Somehow, Joy pulls you forward.
That assurance makes the encounters with hope and insight all the more rewarding—as when Maggie, the real estate agent, finds a moment of reprieve.
“The shape in the darkness is, for the time being, gone,” Maggie narrates. The light “shoots from her fingertips and toes and onto everyone, onto the whole, lost world.”
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