Death Fires

by Ron Faust

A low-budget film shoot on the coast of Mexico becomes the scene of a life-and-death struggle among a ruthlessly manipulative director, a beautiful and frightened actress, and a cinematographer skeptical of the whole affair. Reprint.

224 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 1980

Reviews

[Ben Boulden]

DEATH FIRES is an esoteric thriller about a film crew on the Baja Peninsula. The prose is laconic and perfect, the plot winds into the unusual, the setting and descriptions are wonderful--

"The stars vibrated overhead, millions of them, trembling like wind-blown candle flames in the indigo sky. Small waves softly hissed and died on the shore."

--and the characters flash from beautiful to odd to downright ugly. DEATH FIRES isn't Faust's best work, but it is an interesting attempt to break away from the structure and themes of the standard 1970's suspense novel.

[Linda]

Pretentious crap. Don’t bother

[Todd L]

Did not finish

[Joel]

A ragged, hallucinatory thriller (of sorts) about a psychotic filmmaker and his memory-impaired cinematographer. It's entertaining, funny and at times utterly preposterous (in a good way). Faust's prose is solid and evocative (particularly in his descriptions of the sea). An oddity worth discovering.