Zeroville - By Steve Erickson
A bald-headed loner in a sea of long-haired hippies, Vikar comes to LA the same day the Manson family commits their heinous crimes. This is Vikar’s first day in Los Angeles and the perfect introduction to the world of Zeroville-- one of beauty, artifice, grotesqueness, and brilliance. But that is Hollywood and Vikar, a man with a tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head, has found his Mecca. In fact, for this Asberger protagonist, film becomes his primary language of communication. Think the brain of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night with the body of Bukowski’s lean muscled LA prose. I loved this book. And yes, I wanted to have its babies; it’s that good. As a film critic for Los Angeles Magazine, Erickson knows his stuff, but beyond an encyclopedic knowledge of film, he is a talented storyteller-- things that rarely overlap (remember Roger Ebert’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls?). Erickson has a penned a love letter to Hollywood and the movies and I’m just glad he’s letting us in on the romance.
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