Zeroville [Paperback]

A Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Newsweek Best Book of the Year

It is an August afternoon in 1969. A hippie family led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above L.A. The same day, a young, ex-communicated theology student walks Hollywood Boulevard, having just arrived in town with the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his shaved head. 

At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cineaste but cineautistic, sleeping in the Roosevelt Hotel where he is haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith. He has stepped into the vortex of a culture in upheaval: drugs that frighten him, a sexuality that consumes him, a music he doesn't understand. He's come to Hollywood to pursue his obsession with film, only to find a Hollywood that's as indifferent to film as it is to Vikar.

While the movies have appeared in a number of Steve Erickson's novels, fromDays Between StationstoThe Sea Came in at Midnight, they dominateZerovillewith the force of revelation. Over the decade of the seventies and into the eighties, as the old studios crumble before the onslaught of a new renegade generation, Vikar becomes an unlikely film editor, possessed of an astonishing artistic vision. Through his encounters with starlets, burglars, revolutionaries, escorts, punk musicians and veteran film-makers, he discovers the secret that lies in every motion picture ever made. Combining an epic scope with popular accessibility in the spirit of its subject,Zerovilleis the ultimate novel about the Movies, and the way we don't dream them but rather they dream us.Praise forZeroville

It's simply impossible to explain the intent and the direction of this funny, disturbing, daring and demanding novel—Erickson's best. The set pieces inZeroville are particularly breathtaking.
—The New York Times 

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