The structure of the natural and manufactured world may be a nodal web of endless coequal expansion, but if enough people accept a longitudinal hierarchy as their shared reality, mass hysteria ensues, and a social ladder becomes solid enough to climb. Such has been the case since the dawn of human imperialism, and ever since, those of us who can see the undressed emperor have always easily picked one another out in the crowd. I picked journalist and author Tea Hačić-Vlahović out from this crowd the first time I read her work. So, too, did Giancarlo DiTrapano, the late and legendary editor/publisher of Tyrant Books. A beloved champion of young and daring writers, DiTrapano resuscitated an indie lit scene that had been idling on life support for nearly a generation. He saw the hidden potential in writers like Hačić-Vlahović, whose unpolished prose needed just the right amount of elbow grease to elevate their natural patina. It was only a month before he passed in March of 2021 when Tea texted to tell me that he was planning to publish her second novel, A Cigarette Lit Backwards, and that she had incorporated a small anecdote I had shared with her a year earlier. Her third and most recent novel, Give Me Danger, builds on this lived reality, only in this fictionalized version, her lead character Val’s first novel is a lowbrow bestseller, and her dreams of gaining clout in the indie lit scene are dashed by the news of her would-be publisher’s demise. Val struggles to wade through the gatekeeping social climbers who constitute his outer entourage so that she can simply pay her respects, and her experiences navigating the pomp and circumstance of those who consider themselves the cultural elite are a left-of-center mirror reflecting under an alternating strobe of moody and halogen lighting. Read more.