Listening to an audiobook that was presented as a faux oral history of a 1970s rock band, I was inspired to think about multi-voice audio stories and how they could be applied to other genres and fiction styles. This merged with my interest in Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel “An American Tragedy” and its many adaptations to film and theater.
What began as a literary thought experiment on how to modernize the novel’s characters and settings soon turned into a multi-voice narrative presented as the transcript of a true-crime streaming docuseries. My writing partner Suzanne Dunn and I traveled to Inyo County in California’s Eastern Sierra where we found the perfect small town and courthouse in which to set a new/old tale of social climbing in the age of influencers and the media’s obsession with crime stories and murder trials.
The audiobook production brought together an all-star cast of fourteen voice actors, including Santino Fontana, Marin Ireland, JD Jackson, and real-life TikTok influencer Shelby Young.
