The Book of Dreams

By Craig Nova

Book Overview

Warren Hodges, head of International Pictures, lives in a house like a Norman castle with a view of the Pacific. Marta Brooks, blonde and beautiful, takes classified ads for the Romance Advertiser. Victor Shaw has spent time in Soledad state prison but understands that his future lies in blackmail. Taylor Hayden, a good hit man, shines his shoes and doesn't ask questions. Zimba, a performing elephant, is not as reliable as he looks. This is Hollywood, and Craig Nova makes it seem perfectly logical that these creatures should find themselves in the same cast. In his swift, lyrical prose, comic and moving, Craig Nova weaves disparate lives together into a novel that makes utter beauty out of the gritty and grotesque. This is a story about people who are willing to take the chance they have been waiting for all their lives, men and women trying to live up to their dreams. The Book of Dreams is also a book about California, that youthful place prematurely aged by the burden of too much longing and desire. And the look of the place, with its heartbreaking, ever receding landscape (seen most often through car windows), haunts this novel. Like a jazz pianist, improvising snatches of other tunes while never straying far from the melody, Nova effortlessly echoes the writers who have helped us see the state in earlier times - Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanial West, all are acknowledged here in graceful, amusing riffs. "Using a handful of characters from a high-powered studio chief to a neat-freak hitman whose lives all intersect, Nova spins a gorgeous tale that fully rejuvenates in often surprising fashion the tired Hollywood-novel genre. Despite their familiarity, the characters and their backgrounds are marvelously detailed and ...cliche-free (no small feat in this genre). . . . Nova's eighth novel is so good that it reminds one of the great Day of the Locust." - Library Journal "...These flawed but compelling characters are the walking wounded, limping and cringing with residual pain from their love-starved pasts. A potently visual writer, Nova is also adept at articulating the obtuseness of an obsessed or hopeless mind. His eighth novel, perhaps his best, is enticing, unsettling, and gratifyingly noir...." - Booklist

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0983677468
• ISBN13: 9780983677468
• Release Date: August 2011
• Publisher: Pfp Publishing
• Length: 382 Pages
• Weight: 1.07 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A dark story of place and character

Nova's wit dark wit is well suited to this tale of Hollywood's underbelly. Warren Hodges, head of International Pictures, is one of the film industry's mythic figures - too wealthy and powerful to be human. Into his line of sight walks Marta Brooks, who fulfills her promise of mystery with a nosebleed in his sportscar which she cleanses away with an ocean swim. The scene should be absurd, particularly coming, as it does, after the overweening description of Hodges' party, where, wending his star-struck way towards Marta, Hodges shares a stock tip with a hard-edged actress and averts a drunken suicide with a promise. But his meeting with Marta imparts a hint of redemption, a possibility of tragedy, a touch of the sinister. And it draws the reader on. Nova leaves Hodges behind as he delves into Marta's world. Like the movie magnate, she is a Hollywood native. But she takes ads for the Romance Advertiser and, needing the job, she has agreed to pick up a package for her shady boss. Instead, she finds an empty house, bloodstained walls and clouds of flies. Nova delves deeper, introducing Marta's sad-sack mother, the fantasy Dad she created for Marta, Marta's deep sadness and escape. Escape into the present where, against her better judgment, she pursues the package to a new destination. Where she is followed by another Hollywood native, a recent release from Soledad State Prison, who's hit blackmail paydirt in his cleaning job at a psychiatrist's office. But he needs someone to pick up the money for him, a patsy, and Marta falls into his lap like a ripe plum. Nova weaves his way through the lives of these people, their convoluted route to the moments they share, what they took from a common background to become the creatures they are. Their intersection is outlandish but somehow inevitable. Comic, dark and suspenseful, his story owes its strength to the gritty feel of the place as much as the nuances of character.