There is a vacancy at Bates Motel

“What You See in the Dark, A Novel” by Manuel Muñoz Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $23.95, 251 pp.

Manuel Muñoz’s debut novel is set in Bakersfield, Calif., in 1959. The town is dealing with the murder of a pretty young local woman, a singer named Teresa Garza.

Teresa and the handsome, eligible Dan Watson, who accompanies Teresa on guitar, had been an item.

There’s a parallel story in this intriguing noir novel. A Hollywood actress and her director are in Bakersfield scouting locations for a movie. The movie is Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and the actress is Janet Leigh.

When Muñoz started researching the book, he was looking for a Central Valley town to use as the setting and hit on Bakersfield. At the same time, he didn’t want miss an opportunity to consider “Psycho” as just a horror movie.

“I see it as a character study interrupted by a murder,” Muñoz said in a phone interview. “I knew I had Teresa in mind and I had the actress coming to town. I had to work on how the two stories merge somehow.”

For Muñoz, the linchpin was the character of Arlene Watson. Arlene has several roles in the book. She’s Dan’s mother, a diner waitress and the owner of Watson’s Inn.

The author was thinking of her in terms of Mrs. Bates of the Bates Motel in the movie and what Mrs. Bates would have been like if she had been given a chance to tell her story on the screen.

“I watched ‘Psycho’ countless times before I started the manuscript. There’s something rewarding about seeing things again and again,” Muñoz said.

“Once you are over the fascination of the famous scenes such as the shower scene, the ones everybody remembers, you start looking at the expository themes in the scenes that are just there to show you crucial information.”

Those scenes, he said, fascinated him and helped him shape what he would include in the novel and how he would tell the story.

Muñoz effectively and not self-consciously uses the grammatical second person to tell the story. By the third or fourth draft, he said, it seemed appropriate to use “you,” meaning the reader, so that it mimicked the way a camera can help the viewer see the action without becoming part of the story, he said.

For example, here’s how the novel opens: “If you had been across the street, pretending to investigate the local summer roses outside Holliday’s Flower Shop, you could have seen them through the cafe’s plate glass, the two sitting in a booth by the window, eating lunch.”

The 39-year-old Muñoz, a native of Dinuba, Calif., teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2008.

Manuel Muñoz and Gene Grant discuss “What You See in the Dark” and Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Psycho” at 7 p.m. Monday, April 18, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW. At the same event, local filmmaker Bryan Konefsky will present and discuss a short film made in response to “Psycho.”