Hot Sex, Violence, and Devastating LA Fires

Get ready for a rough and extremely raunchy ride: Terrill Lankford’s Shooters is a propulsive, hypnotic, sexually explicit, blistering exposé of the American hunger for more, more, more.  A hunger that leaves people empty inside, desperate for meaning–no matter how gilded their cage might be.

This thriller has the sheen and danger of that classic cult film The Eyes of Laura Mars, which it cleverly echoes.

Arrogant Nick Gardner’s the same kind of fashion photographer as Faye Dunaway’s character, creating advertising photos that simmer with violence and eroticism.  But he’s much rougher around the edges.  Highly promiscuous, Nick is the kind of guy who’d “rather have sex with a complete stranger than kiss a friend with meaning.” 

He’s a self-confessed “asshole” who loves showing off his mad driving skills in his Lamborghini and the ultra-hot women who want to ride along.  Think of him as a  foul-mouthed Gatsby with a dark past and an even murkier future. 

Nick has made it big in his field, but he’s keenly aware of how fragile success can be in a city littered with failures.  Musing about all the people who linger in Los Angeles even though their dreams have died, he thinks:

“The city is like a terrible drug.  Addictive in the worst way.  Everyone hates it, yet most of them stay no matter what the cost.  Some manage to leave, only to return a year or so later.  Very few have the intestinal fortitude to kick the insanity for good and live elsewhere.  The dream is always there, a brass ring only inches outside their reach.”

There you have a perfect diagnosis of  our cultural sickness, more than fitting for our dark times in 2020.

The book opens with the threat of wildfires engulfing parts of the city and that threat hovers over everyone and everything until it explodes.  It couldn’t be more emblematic of the fire inside Nick and everyone he meets.  They’re all burning for something: drugs, sex, thrills, money, success, fame.  Some will be destroyed.

Feeling blocked one day at work, Nick hits a party he shouldn’t attend and leaves with a hot blonde coke fiend he should never have even talked to–but of course he can’t resist.  Their orgiastic, drug-crazed night ends badly and Nick ends up traveling down some surprisingly mean streets to solve a crime he’s the prime suspect for.

Following his violent stint as an amateur private investigator, we learn about his unsavory past in a town filled with ugly secrets.  Some of them are not for the easily shocked.  Nick is an anti-hero whose trajectory in the novel is always down, and justice is served in unexpected ways.

In all my years reviewing crime fiction for The Detroit Free Press, this is one of the only thrillers I’ve wanted to re-read on a regular basis.  It never fails to blow me away, which is why I’m thrilled to have been asked to write the afterward to the Kindle edition.   The writing is fierce, brutal,  unrelenting–and unforgettable.

Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books in genres from memoir to mystery, including the recent State University of Murder.

 

Knife: Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Fire: Image by Николай Егошин from Pixabay

The Age of Light is a Powerful, Hypnotic Debut Novel

In my years reviewing books on line, on air, and in print, one of the greatest joys has always been discovering a book by an author I was unfamiliar with, or better still, a debut novel that knocked me out.  The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer is my fiction find of the Spring, a masterful tale of art, ambition, genius, professional jealousy, love and betrayal set mainly in Paris between the two world wars.

The story is told from the perspective of view of Lee Miller, a beautiful young American fashion model-turned-photographer.  She falls in with older surrealist photographer Man Ray, already famous when she meets him in her early 20s. Though he’s American-born, he seems completely at home in the hard-drinking, hard-partying multi-national Parisian milieu of artists pushing boundaries, a milieu which is gossip-ridden and decadent around the edges.

At first she’s just his studio assistant, then she models for him, they move in together and collaborate, and in the end he unexpectedly takes public credit for remarkable, innovative work that’s actually hers.  It’s a stunning reversal because we’ve come to see the world as she sees it and we believe in the power of her art independent of her mentor’s.  Perhaps the most compelling moments are watching Miller frame her subjects, observing her discover Paris as teeming with subjects to be photographed.

Paris is cinematic and mouth-watering in Scharer’s descriptions like this one in which the city seems “built on the concept of form over function, where rows of jewel-toned petits fours gleam in a patisserie’s window, too flawless to eat.” Scharer is also deft at capturing various kinds of obsession, of moments where art, love, and lust fuse:

Always, always he is photographing her.  His camera is a third person in the bedroom, and she flirts for it and for him as he takes her picture.  They print the images together, standing hip to hip in the developing room, her body blooming on the paper while they watch.  This way they get to have the moments twice, the images calling up the feelings from the day before until sometimes they stop what they are doing and make love again, quickly, her hands gripping the sink, the picture forgotten and gone black in the developing tray.

The elegant prose and striking insights made me read The Age of Light  slowly because I kept stopping to reflect on lines and scenes.  Beginning writers could learn a lot from the author about creating setting, mood, character–and how to write a sex scene that doesn’t reduce its participants to an assemblage of body parts.

Scharer’s dialogue rings true and so do her period details and details about photography which I never saw in this light even though I once dated a photographer.  Entering a darkroom with Lee is as much an adventure as when she steps into a secret room filled with opium smokers.  Maybe more so.

The Age of Light is a novel to relish and return to, a book that could easily make you see your own world with new eyes.  It’s perfect for armchair travelers and anyone looking for a book that can transport you to another time and place, immerse you in a whole new reality.

Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books including the just-released State University of Murder.  He teaches creative writing workshops at writewithoutborders.com.

 

Instagram Authors?

The New York Times recently reported that fashion designers like Jason Wu and Diane von Furstenberg are turning to Instagram for inspiration and to take the pulse of their fans.  They monitor where and how fans are wearing their designs and also poll fans for opinions and suggestions for their work.

The iPhone app is apparently “generating 25 times the level of engagement of other social media platforms.”  So when will publishers start pushing their authors to switch to this hot new social medium that’s outpacing Facebook and Twitter?

Think of the possibilities!  Authors could find out where and when fans are reading their books.  They could post and enhance photos of themselves on tour and at work. They could post images of how they imagine their characters, seek advice about book covers, and generally engage with their fans 25 times more than they do already on any other social medium and have their photos instantly posted to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Posterous and Tumblr.

Every aspect of their lives, from morning to night, could be photographed and commented on.  Best of all, the Instagram community doesn’t seem to generate the kind of snark other platforms do.

And if they plunged into the new, new thing, they could also catch up with the shifting social media landscape, discovering why Instagram is so hot, why Facebook acquired it for one billion dollars, and why it has this stellar track record, as Kelly Lux reports on her blog:

  • Launched on October 6, 2010
  • #1 in the App Store within 24 hours of launch
  • iPhone App of the Week
  • Holds the record as quickest to reach 1 million downloads, occurring on December 21, 2010
  • Launched 7 new languages
  • An Instagram photo made the cover of the Wall Street Journal
  • Surpassed 25 million users in early March, 2012

The possibilities for authors and their fans are endless, and publishers will no doubt be relentless in chasing after the next Holy Grail of PR.

If they’re not doing so already.