Stars Screaming

by John Kaye

Book Overview

One of the most original novels of Los Angeles in recent years, Stars Screaming takes us beyond the shimmering phenomenon of Hollywood into back streets strewn with the fallout of fame and fortune. Ray Burk is a network censor struggling to break into The Business as a screenwriter. As his wife begins to lose her grip on reality, Burk spends entire days in his car on an endless journey through Los Angeles. His path weaves the present of his dissolving family with the shattering events of his past, circling into the Los Angeles underworld, where his friends, lovers, and enemies intertwine with a volatile mix of pimps, winos, and washed-up starlets who drink away the afternoons trying to recapture the glory days that somehow evaded them. And as the dark secrets emerge, Burk too begins to unravel.

Spanning an arc from the golden 1930s to the bitter 1970s, Stars Screaming is a remarkable portrait of a lost era that captures the moment when the American dream fell apart.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871137429
• ISBN13: 9780871137425
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Engrossing but harrowing

I find it almost impossible to put down John Kaye's two Hollywood novels. This despite the fact that they may severely darken one's view of human nature. Kaye's stories are beautifully crafted but harrowing tales populated by damaged characters struggling to live in the present, though their movements may seem more ruled by vivid recollections of the past. As sadistic, perverted, and predatory as they may be, Kaye's characters are fully formed human beings striving for some measure of success and happiness in a Hollywood where lust, obsession, avarice, ambition, and predation seem to conspire against them at every turn. Kaye is a literary Hieronymus Bosch, who artfully draws the reader into his scenes of torment by staging them against a backdrop of mundane cultural symbols with which most of us can identify, namely the popular music of the times and the locales and personalities that have become part of the Hollywood mystique. Reading this book is like watching someone jump from a high building -- horrifying but too fascinating to turn away from.