In an attempt to carve a contemporary California noir, this author of four "erotic novels" and editor of the San Diego Downtown News, winds up hacking out a treatment for a bad late-night cable movie teeming with skin-deep alcoholic characters and inane dialogue. Philip Lansdale had been living the American dream, but then he woke up. A disbarred San Diego attorney and father of an infant girl and a five-year-old boy who is a budding pyromaniac, he sits around drinking with his neighbors and ogling the beautiful British woman, Cassandra Payne, who lives across the street. Philip begins paying more attention to her than to his own wife, Tina, especially after Cassandra's husband is murdered. While Tina takes to barhopping with her girlfriends, Philip gradually drinks his way up to peeping through Cassandra's windows, drawn by the sultry jazz she plays. It doesn't take her long to "seduce" him at knifepoint, à la Blue Velvet, and when their kinky affair heats up, Philip's son sets his house on fire. Meanwhile, a murder in Cassandra's past brings a hit man and the police to her doorstep, and more mayhem ensues. The story finally lurches to Las Vegas, where Cassandra reveals the secrets of her sordid past, then burns out in a ridiculous sendup of Pulp Fiction
and Deliverance. At one point Philip says, "I wanted to cry but I couldn't. It was like I had no eyes." Readers will wish likewise. (June)
Forecast:No trimmings on this bird, and few buyers.
