Synopses & Reviews
With hints of follows a wealthy young dilettante named Alys, who is as out of place in the Los Angeles of the 1980s as he is on the film sets of the 1920s. And yet that is exactly where he ends up, thanks to the intervention of a film director named Nesselrode, who seems to have traveled straight from the dawn of Hollywood into the present, and who, one day, leads Alys into the catacombs of an abandoned movie theater. The pair emerges in a black-and-white fantasia--a Los Angeles on the verge of becoming itself--where silent films dominate the landscape. Alys soon finds his home in the pictures and falls in love with the seductive siren Moira Silver. But as he finds himself bewitched by old Hollywood, the present proves more and more distant, and Alys ends up lost in time, trapped between here and now. An extraordinarily imaginative tale of faded glamour and elusive love, is a rich and sensual novel by a master of the form.
Review
"Life and art become strangely and gloriously confused when Harris's narrator, Alys, does some time traveling and falls in love with a star of the silent screen...This novel hasn't lost any of its luster since its original publication…it's both ingeniously plotted and lyrically written." —
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"An enthralling, time-traveling version of Alice, in dual wonderlands of 20th-century Hollywood." —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
Synopsis
Originally published in 1982, is a delirious, erotically charged, and wildly inventive novel that presents a writer of limitless imagination at the height of his powers.
About the Author
Donald Heiney (MacDonald Harris was a pseudonym) was born in 1921 and died in 1993. He is the author of sixteen novels, including The Balloonist and Tenth. In 1982, he received the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Sciences for the sum of his work.