Find That First Sentence: The Millions Interviews Christopher Amenta

The Cold Hard Light, published this week from Blackstone, is Christopher Amenta’s debut novel. Set in Amenta’s hometown of Boston, the novel follows Andrew, who goes by H—a new father who becomes obsessed with the man who assaulted his sister. The drama plays out amid the indignities of urban life, touching on racial and economic injustice as well as H’s own thirst for vengeance. The result is taut and gritty—a heavy dose of reality and scathing indictment of American cities. We talked with Amenta about the journey to publication, writing high stakes for his characters, and how his bike rides through Boston shaped his writing.

The Millions: The Cold Hard Light is your debut novel, so I’d love to start by asking you about the path to publication. What was the book’s genesis? What was the publishing process like?

Christopher Amenta: I began working on a version of this book in 2010. I’d had the idea to write about a young man who became obsessed with the guy who had assaulted his sister. However, I couldn’t seem to find the right tone or the right character to put at the center of this story. I put the idea aside for a few years. Then, in November 2017, shortly after a gunman murdered 60 people at a concert in Las Vegas, I started working again. I finished in March of 2020, a few weeks before George Floyd was murdered.isn’t a novel about mass shooters or racially-motivated police violence, but tragedies similar to—and all together unique from—these two were happening throughout the years that I was writing. Some of my frustrations and anxieties and questions began to seep into the work.