Alienist Books News

We have now reached the penultimate post in our celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Alienist’s publication. In the series so far, we have discussed the novel’s origins (Part One), its release and first/special editions (Part Two), and the early attempts to adapt the novel to the screen, including glimpsing a rare leather-bound copy of Steven Katz’s script (Part Three). In today’s post, we will examine how the success of The Alienist led to the publication of a sequel before exploring the various uncorrected proofs (including a very rare proof), an advanced reader copy, first editions, and one example of a paperback that have been released for the novel over the years.

A sequel is called for

It should come as no surprise that the phenomenal success of The Alienist led to a book deal for a second. Partially inspired by Wilkie Collins who often had multiple characters narrating a single mystery, Caleb Carr revealed in interviews that he had similar plans for alternating narrators in the Alienist novels. Speaking to Crime Time in 1997, he explained that the original idea was for “the narration of each book [to] shift from person to person to person, with each narrator telling the story that was most significant for them. I chose Moore in the first book, as he was the most accessible of the group. He was modern in some ways, and I felt that people would have the least trouble with him.”

For the sequel, Caleb decided to shift to a narrator who was, in some respects, easier to write. He told The Seattle Times in 1997 that “Stevie is a little closer to me personally, in terms of growing up in a lot of different worlds, a lot of different levels of society, in New York.” In response to the Crime Time interviewer suggesting that this shift in narrator involved “cheating,” as Stevie was less educated than Moore, Caleb argued, “I didn’t have Moore’s attitudes myself, so you could say that I had to cheat with him as well. This is really to do with language: the way Stevie views the city is not slumming. He’s been there, he has lived in the lower depths, unlike Moore. To a degree, this reflects my background: I lived in an area where it was a question of slumming for the rich kids when they came to buy drugs and act disgracefully, before going back to their well-upholstered homes.”

In an interview with NewCity in 1997, Caleb revealed that he spent eighteen months “creating the world” for the novel that would become the sequel; and, according to Times Union, he would “disappear into 12-hour writing binges” while cloistered “in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on the Lower East Side (in a family-owned brownstone).” The end result would be The Angel of Darkness, a 629-page novel that focused on a female serial killer driven to violence by society’s insistence that motherhood was the only “way for her to be a full, complete woman.” Speaking to Salon about why people find maternal violence particularly difficult to grasp, he said: “You want to believe that there’s one relationship in life that’s beyond betrayal—a relationship that’s beyond that kind of hurt—and there isn’t.”

The proofs are distributed

It is unclear when the manuscript that would become The Angel of Darkness was finally turned in to Random House, but a kind visitor to 17th Street, Steve Rogers, recently obtained what is likely to be one of the earliest extant copies: an extremely rare, non-copy-edited manuscript, signed by Caleb Carr, that was sent to a magazine reviewer in early July of 1997 to meet the lead time for their October issue. The manuscript came presented in a red two-piece tray case, and included a protective cover, a letter addressed to the reviewer by Pamela K. Cannon (a senior publicist at Random House), and an information page about the book. This is a truly special find.