Art imitates life. Or, rather, art influences life, which local author Jeanette Horn etches sharply into the pages of her debut novel, Play, With Knives, released March 4 via Regal House Publishing.
The story follows a struggling theatre troupe traveling by train during their Midwestern tour as a new set designer, Edgar, joins them. He quickly reveals that he hates lies, which seems almost contradictory considering the nature of his job, creating fake settings. But this carries more weight outside of work when he embarks on an affair with Ava, an actress in the company, who hides a big secret from him: She’s married. Beginning backstage before an opening night performance, we are immediately thrust into a chaotic rhythm that underscores the rest of the novel, as Edgar and Ava exchange a passionate yet anxiety-ridden kiss, not knowing what it will lead to.
The other main players add to the chaos. Will tries to fill the shoes of Ben, Ava’s husband, who recently left the troupe after finding success in a Shakespeare company, and he’s a nervous wreck throughout, especially when he believes he’s being followed by the mafia. Chantal provides comic relief as she balances acting, makeup, and costume design, but she’s also insecure about her love life, which worsens after she fails to seduce Edgar. There’s also Art, an Abraham Lincoln look-alike who serves as a wise bartender, and a mysterious fox that slips its way through the compartments of the train.
Though set contemporarily, Play, With Knives hovers in a dimension beyond the constraints of time through its playful-yet-clever fusion of fiction and reality.
Perhaps the most compelling character, though also the most ambiguous, is Fallon, the troupe’s playwright. She’s the company’s puppet master, writing tirelessly on the road to produce new plays. As she brainstorms ideas, and hopes that one will eventually amount to a hit, she draws from the actors’ lives. This is where the magic happens, as Horn inserts excerpts from Fallon’s scripts and diary entries throughout the novel, tracing the evolution of her ideas and, even more so, her perceptions of her troupe. It is up to us to decide what’s real and what’s not – although in some cases she does have control of the narrative, writing scripts that lead to real-life turmoil. One, in particular, includes knives, of course.
The novel shines through its world-building. Though set contemporarily, it hovers in a dimension beyond the constraints of time through its playful-yet-clever fusion of fiction and reality – and the stereotypically drab Midwestern small towns are anything but. In fact, they’re nearly European, as the troupe travels through Madrid, Lisbon, and more places that are described so romantically that it’s easy to forget they’re actually just Madrid and Lisbon, Kansas, not Spain and Portugal. When the actors aren’t visiting these locales, they’re aboard the train, which provides the perfect claustrophobic atmosphere for all of their bubbling tensions.
Play, With Knives is undoubtedly a novel for writers. Each sentence is a character of its own, and Fallon herself obsesses over every word she writes, ensuring that her actors speak all of her lines correctly. With that, it’s also a novel for actors – for people who are constantly figuring out whether to infuse feigned emotions with authenticity, or to just put up a facade. But it’s mainly for audiences, for the witnesses able to absorb fictional events and assign their own meanings to them. That makes all of us; our perception is everything.
Play, With Knives
by Jeanette Horn
Regal House Publishing
This article appears in March 28 • 2025.