Customer Reviews

Fuel-Injected Dreams: A Novel

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My sister, Liz, stole this book from our local library in 1988. She couldn't get a copy so told them that it had been lost. I first read it in 1990 because she talked about it endlessly and I wanted to understand what was so great about it. Once I started it, I couldn't put it down. I read it at home, at work, on the toilet, even (dangerously) while driving my car. I finished it on a car park on a Friday afternoon and immediately burst into tears. No book had ever had that effect on me before. We still only have one copy between us. It's missing the cover and the first few pages of publishers notes but we still read it twice or three times a year and quote bits to each other from time to time.

I could not do this work justice in review. My feelings are split between wanting the whole world to read the book and wanting to keep it to myself for fear that mass appeal will take something of the magic away. During the first reading, I found myself imagining it as a film, complete with score, sets and director's shouted instructions. Now that I hear a film is in the offing I'm nervous for the 3 reasons. 1. As with the book, will the magic disappear when it is exposed to the masses 2. Will justice be done or will essential parts, phrases and above all the screenplay in my mind be blown away by it's adaptation 3. Will it bomb and JRB be held to ridicule

If you're involved with the making of this film please, please, PLEASE do it straight and keep the faith.

Somehow I found a copy of this book sitting on my parent's coffee table. I picked it up and read it at the tender age of 13. I have never let it leave my side since. This book is pure brain candy. The storyline is absolutely thrilling, the characters are well thought out, and the suspense is incredible. I certainly wouldn't call it "modern literature" but it rates in the same category as "Bright Lights Big City" and "Story of My Life".

This is a fabulous read. I picked it up because I loved the cover (not the one pictured on the Amazon site). A beautiful girl with 60's style beehive and a perfect body leans against a mint electric blue stingray; if you look very closely her eyes are the same shade of blue.

The book swings between Scott's teenage years with Cheryl and adulthood twenty years later without her. His love affair with Cheryl came to an abrupt halt when she announced her pregnancy and he reacted in a typically 16 year old way...

Move forward 20 or so years and Scott is a graveyard-shift radio DJ. He doesn't think of Cheryl as much as he used to, but she still haunts his dreams. Strangely, she looks just like the girl on the album cover of his favourite band, the Contrelles. The album came out the same summer Cheryl disappeared.

One day he plays some Contrelle music on his show and then criticises it, and Dennis, the musical genius behind the band, rings in to complain. Scott consequently meets up with him, and even garners an invitation to his house. That's when he sets eyes on Sharlene (the lead singer), still as gorgeous as she was on the album cover, still looking exactly like Cheryl (why?), and completely unattainable by Scott, as she is Dennis' wife. Dennis is a drug-fuelled schizophrenic maniac and given to shooting people that piss him off.

The book is so descriptive, from the sex (there's lots), to the descriptions of the 60's teenage beach scene to Dennis and his maniacal mood swings. Completely unlike anything I have ever read, this book has given me a taste for more of James Robert Baker -his writing style is absolutely original and fun to read.

I searched for a copy of this book for almost 15 years after reading it as a college student! And it was well worth the wait. "Fuel-Injected Dreams" and "Boy Wonder" (the latter I found at Amazon's UK site) are both unlike anything you'll find in the bookstores -- probably why they're so hard to find and known only to a discerning few.

I am currently adapting FUEL INJECTED DREAMS into screenplay form and I must say that it is the most challenging venture of my life. I love this book more than any I have read in the last ten years and must say that I am truly blessed to be in the position that I am in at this moment. Sadly, author James Robert Baker is no longer with us but I can only hope to do his incredible novel the justice it deserves. By all means, if you can find it, FIND IT! You won't be sorry. Hopefully, a reprinting of the book will come about upon release of the film.

This past weekend, I read the first draft screenplay adaptation of James Robert Baker's FIEL-INJECTED DREAMS and was summarily BLOWN AWAY! I then obtained a copy of the book and was, impossibly, FURTHER BLOWN AWAY! To all fans of the book, the movie WILL do justice to the novel and I for one cannot wait to see James Robert Baker's vision fully realized on the silver screen.

This book is the needle, you are the 45 spinning on the turntable of possibility. With J.R.Baker writing the words to the melody, that needle will pick up a hidden track grooved in you: that track is alluring, the violence done to your perspective is a vortex, and you will want to place the needle at the beginning again when the track ends.

With philosophy and history interests this book really isn't my style, I had thought. Sheesh. It is one of the best noir palaces to which an alphabet limo has whisked me. I never wanted Baker's glimmering, gritty party of perspective to end.

When a limo door opens, get in.

Now I must say at the beginning that I'm a huge fan of music, film and soundtracks, but as I re-read this novel again (after years of neglecting it in some box somewhere) I listened to the words as I thumbed through it yet again, taking me back years and years...

The music is as crazy and unique and insane as the plot - a broken man who is a Southern California late-night DJ named Scott spins the wax and remembers his great lost love, as we often sometimes do that late at night over a lousy cup of coffee. Scott wants his first great love, but she's gone with the Santa Ana winds.

Be aware, the cultural references here will hit anyone who has lived in California in the last 40 odd years right on the head, because this book was topical and struck a nerve in me some 25 years ago, even though I was a young punk from Chicago when I first bought it back in the late summer of 1986 - and now in 2009 has hit me even harder.

Surf rock, sexual and musical obsession, the whole SoCal lifestyle, and what has got to be one of the greatest soundtracks, fake and real, ever written into a book. It's intertwined into it's DNA, grafted into the spine and pages - from the momentous sounds of the fictional Stingrays and Sharlene Contrelle to the insane and and sometimes genius-like ramblings out-of-his-head music producer Dennis Contrelle living in his own self-imposed Shangra-La, from the old venues and people who helped create rock and roll...

There are the the cars, the lifestyles, it's all there, and in 'Fuel-Injected Dreams' James Robert Baker has written a magnum opus/homage/tribute/indictment of the time he himself lived there, a wonderful spinning yarn of action, drugs, passion, tears, love, sex, sex, sex and of course, rock and roll.

A quick note: James had written a book the previous year, 'Adrenaline' (under the pseudonym James Dillinger) and that book is the flipside to this one, both novels painting a fantastic too-real-to-be-believed time long since past, but so ingrained with detail about living on the West Coast during the musical, sexual and cultural changes from the 60's generation and the 80's Us generation, and it's exhausting but remarkable, the pace, the music, the action, the tension!

On the down side, I must admit it is very much dated, and sure, many of the references to certain resturants, places etc. out West due fall flat (as many of them no longer exist), but this book reads like a wildly bright neon painted coat worn by Don Johnson on a mile of coke, and it clings to your brain and won't let go. I am one of those readers that just who didn't put it down and was finished with it in only a few days. I've read it before almost 25 years ago and it affected me then, and now that I've re-read it, and I not only know every dirty corner of L.A.'s seedier side, I know where they're at if I went there, and I've never even been there! Just take the Pacific Coast Highway, it seems to take you anywhere...

There have been some rumblings from previous reviews and online of "screenplays" being written for this, and to be honest I'd always thought this would be the ultimate rock-and-roll movie, but those were recited over some 10 years ago, and of course, Hollywood is a fickle beast.

This would be a wonderful movie, because if you read the book, you'll fall in love with it, it's like someone turned on the oldies station on surf-rock night, and The Vectors and so many other bands from the book will be there too, playing just for you, and breaking your heart over and over 'til dawn.

The ending is as sad as any writer can make it - it's a mind-numbing tragedy, and on a scale that will blow you away when you get there. All I can say is that if and when you, the reader, pick this up, PLEASE understand that this is a true rock and roll fantasy novel - THE ultimate rock and roll novel, bigger and better than Streets of Fire - and it will change you, maybe just a bit, but just enough to say "Is that all there is? Can a sequel be made?" It's THAT good.

Pick up a copy today, and you won't put it down.

Please, if you have any comments, put them here - I'd like to hear from anyone else who fell in love with Cheryl Rampton as much as I did when I read this tragic tale of teen love and always wanted to jump into the novel at that critical moment - when you read it you'll know what I'm talking about - and somehow change it, just a little, and somehow, with due deference to Meat Loaf, make some real rock and roll dreams come true.

Thanks for reading.

I think anyone who likes a book to snug up with with enjoy this book as much as I did.

I thought this was the best book ever! Just reading the first page, then the next...standing in the bookstore. I love the sarcasm, the sex, the detailed descriptions. I was laughing out loud! I could picture everything he was talking about, it was very vivid. I just can't find anything that could compare to it. Nothing. I need to find a book with twisting personalities. More sick and disturbubed people. With some sane ones on the side, all with humor. I need more raunch, honesty, sex, sarcasm, dark sides, lies, swearing, a total twist at the end...I miss this author, he did it for me. Let me know if there is another book for me, that comes close to this one.