Stars Screaming
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"A cross between The Player, The Day of the Locust, and Sunset Boulevard . . . A gritty, bizarre, yet all-too-believable Tinseltown epic." —Detour
Ray Burk is a disillusioned network censor struggling to break into the business as a screenwriter. But it's the drama of his personal life that occupies him most—as his unbalanced wife Sandra and neglected son grow more and more detached from the real world. Trying to make sense of it all, Burk spends days on marathon drives through Los Angeles, cruising from one idea to the next in hopes of making it rich.
Then Ray crosses paths with a young victim of a Hollywood dream turned nightmare. Her story is one of vengeance and dark secrets, and Ray can't resist its infernal pull. But in a world of make-believe, his descent into the twilight underworld of the City of Angels may be too real to escape.
Taking us beyond the shimmering marquees of Hollywood into back streets strewn with the fallout of fame and fortune, "Stars Screaming is an astonishing debut. I couldn't put it down" (Anne Lamott, New York Times–bestselling author of Hallelujah Anyway).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ray Burk, the hero of this melodramatic, trigger-happy first novel, is a CBS censor in Los Angeles who spends his time hating his job, pitying himself and dreaming of becoming a screenwriter. Then life intervenes in a series of improbable events: his wife Sandra has a miscarriage, loses her mind and ends up shooting a man in self-defense; his son Louie exhibits disturbing behavior at school; Ray falls in love with a stranger who tries to kill someone and gets shot dead in the process. Living through this turmoil, he finds the inspiration to write a successful screenplay about growing up in L.A. As self-obsessed Ray learns the downsides of being a writer in 1970s Hollywood (he is not allowed on the set, and is constantly being asked to change the script), he tries to escape the pressures of his personal life by driving around the city, passing the time in seedy bars. Kaye paints a familiar L.A.: a small town where everyone shares a past and the so-called six degrees of separation are cut down to about two. The coincidences are outlandish and unbelievable--just one symptom of the author's inability to decide how seriously to take his characters' over-eventful lives--but screenwriter Kaye has a feeling for quick-and-dirty drama and 1940s-'70s Southern California scenery that marks him as a veteran of the lots, or at least the cineplex.
