Imperial Bedrooms, by Bret Easton Ellis

There’s a reason fans of noir enjoy Ellis so much: his work is often bleak, brutal, and uncompromising. Over the course of his career, he’s experimented with minimalism, and Imperial Bedrooms finds him at his leanest.
In some ways this book brings Ellis full-circle, re-visiting the central characters of his first novel, Less Than Zero, some twenty-odd years ago, but to call Imperial Bedrooms a sequel isn’t quite right, as the tone and subject matter are completely different, as different as the life of a middle-aged narcissist is from the life of a vacuous twenty-something. Bedrooms is, in some ways, a crime novel, but infected with a strangely post-modern (yeah, I said post-modern) surrealism.
Clay, the self-obsessed pretty-boy of Less Than Zero, is now a self-obsessed middle-aged screenwriter recently returned to Hollywood to cast his latest film. He’s almost immediately drawn back into the sordid world of his old friends and lovers, meets a superficially gorgeous young actress who is clearly using him as much as he’s using her.
But some of his acquaintances are involved in something big and ugly and dangerous, and when Clay begins getting threatening text messages and spotting a mysterious black vehicle parked in front of his building, he begins a downward spiral of violence and paranoia. Old friends wind up dead. New friends begin acting shiftily. And Clay begins to realize that his own life could be forfeit in a game where there are no rules.
If that synopsis sounds vague, well… it is. The plot of Imperial Bedrooms doesn’t hinge on concrete events so much as gradual stumbles downward into… what? There are no real answers in this book, just as the questions themselves are only half-formed. The real story is Clay’s ever-increasing paranoia and unreliability as a narrator, back dropped against a strange and uncertain version of L.A. and populated by a cast of characters that slink through his life like sinister shadows. The lines between what’s real and imagined become increasingly thin-- hinted at in even the first chapter, when Clay tells us about the movie Less Than Zero, based only loosely on the “real events”.
Imperial Bedrooms is an uneasy book, and Ellis is his usual fearless self. Recommended.

Mulholland Books

So you probably already heard about the new crime imprint from Little, Brown, Mulholland Books. Here's the website: http://www.mulhollandbooks.com/
http://www.mulhollandbooks.com/
Duane Swierczynski, Charlie Huston, Lawrence Block... those are some of the first names to have books out on the new imprint. Come on, man, admit it, that absolutely rocks. Here's to a long life for Mulholland Books!

Ego-busting critique

Finished the latest round of re-writes on City of Heretics last night. See, I thought I was done with it until my good friend Christian did a detailed critique that revealed all the problems with the manuscript... and fuck me, there were LOTS of them.
The hard part was, I was expecting him to return the manuscript full of comments like 'Oh my god, you're some kind of genius, Heath! You're the greatest writer in the world and I'm not worthy to read your work!'
Eh, it didn't work out quite that way...
Here's the funny thing: Christian doesnt' even write this kinda stuff; he's a fantasy writer... (a damn good one, though; he just secured a big name agent and things are looking good for his book)... my point being, he's only passingly familiar with the conventions of the noir thriller.
And yet, his analysis was right on the money. There were long bits in City of Heretics that needed trimming, there were misplaced info dumps, there was boring charater stuff and scenes that went nowhere. Christian had red ink all over the damn place.
I wound up using about 95% of his suggestions. Some of them I had to think long and hard about but in the end I had to admit he was right.
So thanks, Christian, you literary hard-ass, for making City of Heretics a better book.

The Remains, by Vincent Zandri

As young girls, Rebecca and her sister Molly lived through a nightmare abduction, held captive by a madman for three agonizing hours. They only barely escaped. For thirty years they kept this to themselves, a secret bond between sisters, until Molly died of cancer. Now, Rebecca carries the burden by herself.
But the nightmare isn’t over. When she begins getting threatening texts and messages, Rebecca learns that the madman who tormented her and her sister is free, and looking to clear up unfinished business.
The Remains is another fast-paced thriller from Zandri, but remarkable in that it’s told mostly from a female perspective. I’ve gotten accustomed to the sensitive tough guys that usually populate Zandri’s books, so it was a pleasant surprise to see him work so convincingly around a woman protagonist. Rebecca is a great character, fully formed and believable, and as the tension mounts and the story hurtles head-long toward a stunning climax, you’re with her one-hundred percent.
The villain in The Remains is chilling and Zandri ratchets up the suspense like the old pro he is. I’d like to see him experiment even more with these remarkable new points of view.

A lousy summer slump...

Just coming out of one of those annoying slumps, the kind when the kicks that usually work for you just don’t cut it. Over the last two months, I’ve hardly written a word, I’ve read only two or three books and even the movie-watching has dropped off. Don’t know why, can’t explain it. It’s been awhile since I experienced that sort of complete lack of interest in the things I normally love and it’s always accompanied by a general sense of malaise and unfocused anxiety. Weird.
But as I say, I’m coming out of it now. The two or three books I read eventually kick-started my imagination again (the Zeltserman book in the previous review, Burrough’s Junky, and the new one by Vincent Zandri, which was pretty goddamn awesome, review coming soon). I’ve been getting excited again about outlining a new novel and doing some much-needed revisions on City of Heretics. Much catching up to do. Two months is much too long to stew around not enjoying anything, don’t you think?

Story is my religion. Twain is my god, and Jesus, I guess, would be Hemingway. There are tons of prophets and wise men,literary saints like Steinbeck or Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson (the crazy saint!) and David Goodis, Fitzgerald and Richard Stark.
These guys give me all the comfort and succor I need in an otherwise dark and unpleasant world...

Killer, by Dave Zeltserman

Aged hit man Leonard March is back in Boston after fourteen years in the slammer. And he’s lucky it was only fourteen-- turning state’s evidence on his former employer spared him a longer term.
But now, working as a janitor and living in a filthy dive, March is haunted by the memories of his murders and wracked with guilt over his non-existent relationship with his children. He’s playing out his final days, knowing that, sooner or later, his old boss’s thugs will come after him and make him pay for his betrayal. Either that, or one of his victim’s relatives.
There’s more to this sad old man than what meets the eye, however. While Leonard March may be repentant, just how much of the cold-blooded killer is left inside him? Before Killer is over, the reader will learn the chilling answer to that question.
This is Dave Zeltserman’s final book in the so-called “Man Out of Prison” trilogy, and fans of Pariah and Small Crimes might be surprised by the strangely contemplative nature of the story. On the surface, Killer is about regret, loneliness, and that old inevitable mortality thing. But scratch a little deeper and even darker themes emerge… it all leads to a truly shocking climax that could be Zeltserman’s darkest yet-- and this is a writer who has made a fine art out of dark and shocking climaxes.