In this dark, twisted look at Hollywood celebrity, author Daniel Allen Cox shows us the seedy underbelly of the movie industry through the eyes of actor Michael-David. Ruined by fame and the banality of mainstream movies, and as paranoid as they come, Michael-David goes AWOL after a film role takes a disturbing turn during shooting.
Cox’s portrait of his protagonist is expertly rendered, making the reader squirm in discomfort as a result of being placed so squarely inside Michael-David’s mind. His paranoia is all-consuming, from stressing about not getting good roles or performing poorly in the roles he does get to worrying about his age: “At forty, I was too old to be hip, but too young to be distinguished. To be an actor between the ages of forty and forty-four in the film industry is to be a corpse walking through a cemetery, grasping at whatever script pages you can clutch in your zombie hands.”
Cox cleverly examines this period in Michael-David’s life while playing around with the limits of a first-person narrator. To fill the reader in on what’s happening in scenes where he isn’t present, Michael-David frequently imagines what might be occurring. Although the technique is initially difficult to swallow, it does lend depth to the story, and to its protagonist. Michael-David’s paranoia is pervasive enough that it seems believable he would fabricate detailed storylines about other people in his life. In doing so, Michael-David morphs from actor into director, controlling the actions of key players in his story.
The novel is often self-referential. Sometimes, this works surprisingly well, but at other times – in both the novel Michael-David inhabits and the film he is working on – Cox’s “fiction imitating fiction” doesn’t gel.