Zeroville: A Novel
Product Description [Read by Bronson Pinchot] This ''darkly beautiful'' (Washington Post) novel has been hailed as Erickson's best. 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 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 cineaste but ''cineautistic,'' sleeping at night in the Roosevelt Hotel where he's haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith. 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, he 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. About the Author Steve Erickson is the author of both fiction and nonfiction works, including two books on American politics and popular culture that have been published in ten languages. His work has appeared in such publications as Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times magazine. He is currently the film critic for Los Angeles magazine and the editor of the literary journal Black Clock, which is published by the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature.