Desert Palm Motel, Room 6: A Recording

By Lysette Kennedy and Donna Burgess

If your phone ever rings once and then stops, let it.Los Angeles, 1958. Eli Mercer steps off the train at Union Station with one suitcase, a knife wrapped in a dead cousin's handkerchief, and a face built for the movies. Within a week he has learned the rules of the boarding house off Franklin Avenue: Don't drink from the left-hand glasses. Don't answer anything until you've been asked twice. And if the phone rings three times, you're already invited.Then a car arrives that nobody called, and Eli is taken up the Hill to meet the Circle: the quiet, courteous people who decide who in Hollywood gets to stand in the light, and who pays for it. Because something up there is always hungry. And every Tuesday, somebody has to be kept.Eli learns to survive. That's the problem. Every time he's clever, someone else pays his bill. And the next person in line is the boy he loves.Twenty years later, Eli checks into Room 6 of a seedy Hollywood motel and finds a cassette recorder already waiting on the table. He saw it there in 1958, before machines like it existed. He pressed play, and heard his own voice confessing.Now he's ready to finish the recording.Spanning the backlots, parties and canyon houses of Hollywood from the 1950s to 1980, Desert Palm Motel, Room 6 is a slow-burn occult horror novel about fame, consent, and the terrible arithmetic of survival. It's told as a confession on tape, by a man who knows exactly how his story ends.Press play. Then pray it only rings once.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HMFF5VRM
• ISBN13: 9798277368046
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"