Publisher Description
On the same August day in 1969 that a crazed hippie "family" led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above Los Angeles, a young ex-communicated seminarian arrives with images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift—"the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies"—tattooed on his head. At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cineaste but "cineautistic," sleeping at night in the Roosevelt Hotel where he's haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith. Vikar has stepped into the vortex of a culture in upheaval: strange drugs that frighten him, a strange sexuality that consumes him, a strange music he doesn't understand. Over the course of the seventies and into the eighties, he pursues his obsession with film from one screening to the next and through a series of cinema-besotted conversations and encounters with starlets, burglars, guerrillas, escorts, teenage punks, and veteran film editors, only to discover a secret whose clues lie in every film ever made.
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“Although cineasts are the obvious audience for this atmospheric novel
(it contains literally hundreds of references to obscure and classic
films), others may find themselves falling under its spell, for its
effect is much like that of a strange but very beautiful art film.”
—
Booklist
About Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson is
the author of both fiction and nonfiction works, including two books on
American politics and popular culture that have been published in ten
languages. His work has appeared in such publications as Esquire, Rolling
Stone, and the New York Times magazine.
He is currently the film critic for Los Angeles magazine and the editor of the literary journal Black Clock,
which is published by the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches.
He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters
award in literature.
About Bronson Pinchot
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.