Stars Screaming

By John Kaye

Book Overview

An unsparing and sensual novel about lost dreams and unrequited love, Stars Screaming captures Los Angeles from the 1940s to the 1970s, a time when the American dream fell apart. In this unflinching and gritty portrait of a lost era, Kaye has created a strange and heartbreaking gallery of characters and tells their unforgettable stories.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871136910
• ISBN13: 9780871136916
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 325 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.3"

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.