After reading Manuel Munoz’s novel, “What You See in the Dark,” I didn’t think too much of it, but I didn’t know how to explain it. A comment from a stranger ended up summing up the gist of the entire book in a way that I couldn’t have worded better. Seeing the book on my kitchen table, they scanned the cover and read it aloud, “‘What You See in the Dark?’ You don’t see nothing in the dark.”

The beginning of the novel was very interesting. The end of the first chapter pulled me into the story. I read through the rest of the book intently, waiting for the pieces to fall together.

When the climax finally occurred, I was disappointed.

The story takes place in Bakersfield in the late ’50s and mentions certain locations around town that I have never heard of. This might be because they don’t exist anymore or they never did. The setting is mentioned often, but I don’t think it had too much to do with the plot of the story.

The story revolves around three women who are connected through a crime that takes place in the first chapter. After the beginning of the book, the rest goes on to explain what happened before this occurrence, and what provoked it.

Two of the main characters are women who live in Bakersfield. It explains their story and goes into depth on what their intentions and ambitions are, along with what others in town think of them.

One of the characters in the book is an actress traveling to Bakersfield to shoot a movie. It never says who the actress is, what movie she is shooting, or what the director’s name is. Three quarters into the book it became clear that the film they were shooting was Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”

The rest of the book I assumed would clear up some confusion about what exactly happened in the first chapter while tying in the production of this film. It didn’t

Maybe this didn’t have much to do with the message Munoz was trying to get across, but it seemed incomplete to me.

The stories did connect, just not in the way I anticipated.

I believe the connection was symbolic of the era and how things in society and entertainment were shifting toward a different direction.

The fact that the book talked about a real movie being filmed, and described almost exactly how certain scenes were shot, made me question if the book had some truth behind it. A lot of things in the book seem like they could have happened. I found out later that the book is completely fiction and the movie “Psycho” wasn’t even shot in Bakersfield.

Munoz is a decent writer, and he paints a very clear picture of the setting and goes into each character’s thought process in a way I’ve rarely seen before. I feel the book was a good drama, but I was expecting a mystery, and when the first chapter ends in such a manner, I would have enjoyed more analysis. I guess my eyes never adjusted to the darkness. I saw nothing.

Munoz will be giving two presentations at Bakersfield College on April 6 in the Levan Center, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.