In Bakersfield in the late 1950s, an actress arrives for the filming of Psycho. A shoe store clerk fantasizes about her coworker’s relationship with Dan, the handsomest man in town. A new highway makes an abandoned wife’s motel obsolete. And Teresa, the object of Dan’s affection, sings cowboy ballads in stolen boots.

If that paragraph reads more like a movie trailer voiceover than a book review, the reason is that Manuel Muñoz has deliberately blurred the line between fiction and film. Some less interesting authors do this by making their bestsellers ready to leap off the page and onto the screen, for the highest bidder. But Muñoz’s debut novel, although it has a highly cinematic book trailer, is not one of them.

One reason is that the fantasies and voyeuristic tendencies of Muñoz’s characters are not focused on Hollywood glamor, but rather on the people around them; the people who, with a few changes of luck and circumstance, they could actually be. The shoe store clerk longs for her coworker’s boyfriend to the extent that she imagines every object in Teresa’s apartment. Arlene, the abandoned wife, goes to see Psycho, but walks out because she is afraid that her presence will remind the other watchers of the commonalities between her own life and the film.

In continually returning to the consequences of seeing, of having watched, Muñoz makes his characters into fiction writers who think they are exercising the axiom “write what you know.” But as Arlene reminds them, “There’s the story you think you know, and there’s the one I need to tell you.” In this need, in learning the real story, in knowing rather than imagining, lies the death of someone’s fantasy life.

Through exceptional details, Muñoz brings this biblical, Eve-eating-the-apple truth to light. The shoe store clerk preserves her imagination because the paperboy misses her porch in the rain, running the ink of the article on Teresa’s tragedy. The actress describes the almost clinical process of filming the shower scene in Psycho, exposing the illusion of the film so that all we are left with are her dead eyes.

This tension between wanting to see and wanting to stop seeing, to live a life of the imagination, keeps the novel suspenseful and fresh. The title, What You See in the Dark, effectively plays on these conflicting desires – the darkness could be what obscures the truth and allows characters to keep living their lives of fantasy. Or it could be the finality of knowing the real story, and closing your eyes to the consequences.

What You See in the Dark is available from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, priced $23.95.