Synopses & Reviews
On the same August day in 1969 that a crazed hippie "family" led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above Los Angeles, a young ex-communicated seminarian arrives with the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift "the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies" tattooed on his head. At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cinéaste but "cineautistic," sleeping at night in the Roosevelt Hotel where he's haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith, and behind the screen of the Chinese Theatre where "images from the movie fly over him as though he's lying at the end of a runway, below an endless stream of jetliners landing." Vikar has stepped into the vortex of a culture in upheaval: strange drugs that frighten him, a strange sexuality that consumes him, a strange music he doesn't understand. Over the course of the Seventies and into the Eighties, as the old studios crumble before the onslaught of a new, renegade generation, Vikar pursues his obsession with film from one screening to the next and through a series of cinema-besotted conversations and encounters with starlets, burglars, guerrillas, escorts, teenage punks and veteran film editors, only to discover a secret whose clues lie in every film ever made, and only to find that we don't dream the Movies but rather they dream us.
Review
"Although cineasts are the obvious audience for this atmospheric novel (it contains literally hundreds of references to obscure and classic films), others may find themselves falling under its spell, for its effect is much like that of a strange but very beautiful art film." Booklist
Review
"[Vikar's] adventures read like a fable inspired by the French New Wave. Steve Erickson's Zeroville inhabits a sweet spot where fiction and film criticism merge, wryly imagining a world in which house burglars parse John Ford Westerns. (Grade: B+)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"A novel that will especially appeal to cinephiles, for Erickson makes more allusions to film, starting with his Godard-like title, than perhaps any novelist you've read." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Erickson is as unique and vital and pure a voice as American fiction has produced." Jonathan Lethem
Review
"That Zeroville...accomplishes such gait in 352 pages of mostly short, numbered vignettes, is yet another facet of its unmistakable, so sleek brilliance....Zeroville is addictive. It is a puzzle that lives inside your head." Blake Butler, Bookslut.com
Review
"Erickson...manages to wipe clean the presumptions typically guiding the Hollywood Novel, which suggest either that Hollywood is irredeemably corrupt or that moviemaking is a tainted beauty requiring the ministrations of a pure artistic vision to recover its virtue. He embeds in his story a deeply thoughtful look at the art of filmmaking, not the pathology of the film industry." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Terse, fanciful, dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish, this remarkable novel will test you and tease you and leave you desperate to line up at Film Forum (or hunt down Erickson's top 150 on DVD) so you can submit yourself to the celluloid bonds that hold Vikar and his creator such willing captives." New York Times
Review
"Just when you thought that the Hollywood novel had fizzled out with all the eclat of an inebriated Mickey Rourke driving through Miami on a Vespa, another writer has come along with high-octane fuel for the form." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"[Erickson's] eighth and best novel....What Erickson is celebrating here isn't any sort of pantheon (Vikar finds his dream frame in both great films and dreck) but the ability of movies to plug right into our deepest fears and raptures." Charles Taylor, The Nation
Review
"In Zeroville Steve Erickson weaves a gripping, yet free-floating and dizzyingly surreal narrative that is frequently punctuated with Hollywood greats named and unnamed, real and imagined. Half of the fun is trying to connect the less obvious incidents and characters with their real-life analogues." Gerry Donaghy, Powells.com (read the entire Powells.com review)
Review
"Since 1985, with his first novel, Days Between Stations, and now with Zeroville, his eighth and best novel, Erickson has been a singular voice in American fiction, for my money our most imaginative native novelist....There's no denying the hallucinatory nature of Erickson's novels. But even when they spiral off into the strangest territory, they always make emotional sense..." Charles Taylor, The Nation (read the entire review from The Nation)
Synopsis
A film-obsessed ex-seminarian with images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his head arrives on Hollywood Boulevard in 1969. Vikar Jerome enters the vortex of a cultural transformation: rock and roll, sex, drugs, and most important to him the decline of the movie studios and the rise of independent directors. Jerome becomes a film editor of astonishing vision. Through encounters with former starlets, burglars, political guerillas, punk musicians, and veteran filmmakers, he discovers the secret that lies in every movie ever made.
Synopsis
ALos Angeles Times, Washington Post, andNewsweekBest Book of the Year
It is an August afternoon in 1969. A hippie "family" led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above L.A. The same day, a young, ex-communicated theology student walks Hollywood Boulevard, having just arrived in town with the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his shaved head.
At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cineaste but "cineautistic," sleeping in the Roosevelt Hotel where he is haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith. He has stepped into the vortex of a culture in upheaval: drugs that frighten him, a sexuality that consumes him, a music he doesn't understand. He's come to Hollywood to pursue his obsession with film, only to find a Hollywood that's as indifferent to film as it is to Vikar.
While the movies have appeared in a number of Steve Erickson's novels, from Days Between Stations to The Sea Came in at Midnight, they dominate Zeroville with the force of revelation. Over the decade of the seventies and into the eighties, as the old studios crumble before the onslaught of a new renegade generation, Vikar becomes an unlikely film editor, possessed of an astonishing artistic vision. Through his encounters with starlets, burglars, revolutionaries, escorts, punk musicians and veteran film-makers, he discovers the secret that lies in every motion picture ever made. Combining an epic scope with popular accessibility in the spirit of its subject, Zeroville is the ultimate novel about the Movies, and the way we don't dream them but rather they dream us."
About the Author
Los Angeles writer Steve Erickson was born in Santa Monica in 1950, and has published seven novels and two books of non-fiction. Currently a teacher in the CalArts MFA writing program, a film critic for Los Angeles magazine, and the editor of Black Clock, he received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2007.