Stars Screaming takes us beyond the shimmering phenomenon of Hollywood into the back streets of Los Angeles, exposing the fallout of fame and fortune. Ray Burk is a network censor struggling to break into The Business as a screenwriter. His wife is slowly losing her grip on reality and so Burk, in escape, spends entire days in his car, dealing around the city, reminiscing about all the friends, enemies, and lovers who have crossed his path: The damaged souls that inhabit the Los Angeles underworld, a volatile mix of pimps, winos, and washed-up starlets who spend their days in smoke-filled juice joints replaying the glory days that have somehow slipped away. Pressure builds on Burk, and he too begins to unravel as stories from his past merge with the present, uncovering the dark secrets and shattering consequences of his life.
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From Library Journal
This first novel by screenwriter John Kaye (American Hot Wax, Where the Buffalo Roam) is about first-time screenwriter Ray Burk, who takes to driving relentlessly around L.A. to escape the anxieties caused by his first film and his wife's illness by sorting through his memories. The result, though, is that Burk slowly begins to lose hold of his own life as past and present begin to blur. This is an extraordinary, imaginative work, pleasingly structured as a rondo of characters and time periods, all cogently detailed. Like most 1990s movies, the book goes a little soft at the end, but it's a real zinger, like a Six Degrees of Separation spanning three decades of Hollywood history and movie/pop culture.?David Bartholomew, NYPL
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
So many recent Hollywood novels rationalize the present state of moviemaking in America that it's refreshing to find this first novel by screenwriter Kaye set firmly in the tradition of Nathanael West. Here's the sordid underside of big-time film, incorporating that most elusive of qualities in movieland--a sense of history. Kaye also discerns the odd connectedness of lives in Los Angeles, and he astutely measures the degrees of separation linking everyone in a company town like Hollywood, where evil is blithely tolerated in the powerful, and everyone else seems to have a hard- luck story. Ray Burk, Kaye's troubled protagonist, is an aspiring writer whose life begins to fall apart when his wife, Sandra, takes a job as a stripper and starts to neglect their young son. Having abandoned a soulless job with a TV network, Burk mines his past for marketable screenplay ideas, and eventually he sells a fictionalization of a wild, formative night in his Los Angeles youth, a time marked by his abandonment by his own mother. As Burk restlessly drives the streets, fretting about his career and about Sandra, and reliving his youth, he stumbles across the story of Max Rheingold, a loathsome producer whose notorious pedophilia left many victims in his wake, including the vengeful Bonnie Simpson. The grownup Bonnie, whom Burk meets during his marathon drives, is determined to shoot Max, who in fact now suffers from prostate cancer and--worse--is broke and considered a bad joke by filmdom's powerbrokers. In the strange twilit world of the novel, it's Bonnie's son who eventually enacts revenge, helped by his lover, Ricky Furlong, Burk's teenage rival at baseball, whose major-league debut was climaxed (and his career ended) by a mental breakdown. Kaye may not possess West's savage anger, but he memorably captures the sprawling madness and demonic myths of America's dream factory. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Kaye does such a fine job of portraying the bi-polar world of Hollywood, the highs and lows, always connecting them by finely detailed characters. People in this book are all part of one another; "no man is an island." Almost to a fault. We view these characters through Burks wandering and weaving through the city as his personal life collapses. This is the strength of the novel; his portrayal of a Hollywood of stars and has beens and near-was' all imported from small towns and co-habitating on the ideal of success and stardom. Whether they find it or fail.
I think the weakness of the novel comes in the central plot. Burks personal world, his family. Regardless of how his relationships fall apart, how drunk or drugged he becomes, he rather easily succeeds and holds that success. Burk's character seems to work contrary to the Hollywood Kaye portrays. He treats women in the novel as basically stepping stones, poor Burk is looking for a mother (as long as Burk worships their memories it's ok?) As long as these women believed in him or aided him they are martyrs. With all of the well executed and complicated jumping around to secondary characters lives as well as clever plot twists, the novel ends on such a cliche'd note. The novel is not a let down, but it is a drag at the end. I mean Burk and his son seem to be teflon to the seedy tragic world Kaye creates around them.
Kaye seems to believe in some type of higher order, that all things happen and are connected and we must believe in this. That living life with good intentions and love does not necessarily just save us, it gets us a succesful career in pictures and a well adjusted son. It gets us the American dream. The novel, in short, lacks the real meaningless tragedies of this world.
... Read more ›1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I find it almost impossible to put down John Kaye's two Hollywood novels. This despite the fact that they may severely darken one's view of human nature. Kaye's stories are beautifully crafted but harrowing tales populated by damaged characters struggling to live in the present, though their movements may seem more ruled by vivid recollections of the past. As sadistic, perverted, and predatory as they may be, Kaye's characters are fully formed human beings striving for some measure of success and happiness in a Hollywood where lust, obsession, avarice, ambition, and predation seem to conspire against them at every turn. Kaye is a literary Hieronymus Bosch, who artfully draws the reader into his scenes of torment by staging them against a backdrop of mundane cultural symbols with which most of us can identify, namely the popular music of the times and the locales and personalities that have become part of the Hollywood mystique. Reading this book is like watching someone jump from a high building -- horrifying but too fascinating to turn away from.
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