Hollywood Boulevard is littered with junkies, pimps, and prostitutes. Up and down the lane you'll find small movie theaters showing films no studio executive would ever sign off on, even if those same executives sneak into the grindhouse theaters to see what sort of filth the masses prefer to saccharine schlop like Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People ...
You'll get three sordid features for one ticket TEMPLE OF THE RAT by Alec Cizak The 1979 tale of a deranged preacher, a homeless combat vet, and a B-Movie power couple driven to madness inside the mecca of licentious evil & outside on the streets of Hollywood Boulevard.
THE ROACH KING OF PARADISE by Scotch Rutherford
A pandering motel manager makes a pact with a street pimp to turn a downtown motor inn into a brothel. A Hollywood vice cop who owes a loan shark a hefty vig attempts to squash her debt while settling an old score.
and
LADY TOMAHAWK by Andrew Miller
In 1980 the top male escort of the decadent Hollywood elite is stalked by an indomitable female predator with a shadowy past while exposing an unholy alliance between the rites of traditional morals, and their diabolical scribes.
So, come on in, grab yourself a bucket of popcorn and a soda. Nobody will bother you for wearing a raincoat. After all, everybody else is wearing one! Ignore the sounds of streetwalkers earning a living all around you. And if your shoes stick to the floor, well, might be a good idea to put on some gloves and scrub them with a wire brush when you get home...
This is L.A. Stories . A wild ride across the bridge between the permissive 1970s and the repressive decades that followed.
Alec Cizak was dropped off on the planet Earth by Lao Tzu after the old wizard made love to a seven-legged go-go dancer from the interior regions of Neptune. The dancer refused to care for the infant Cizak and so Lao Tzu brought the baby to Earth and left him with a cult of syphilitic monks on an island in the Pacific Ocean. Cizak was granted immortality by the goddess Molena, a stripper from Spain, on the condition that he never reveal her recipe for spaghetti and eyeball soup. Unable to contain this magnificent secret, Cizak whispered the recipe to a Belgium nun named Poinsettia. The goddess Molena cursed Cizak to mortality and a bit of talent as a writer no significant number of his fellow mortals would ever care too much about. He currently lives with his wife in a cave in Antarctica where he writes dime novels under a pen name that cannot be revealed here for national security purposes.
The gem in this trilogy is Scotch Rutherford's "Roach King," an ensemble portrait of the denizens of a sleazy downtown L.A. hot-sheet motel, which suggests how Robert Altman might have adapted the collected works of Iceberg Slim. All the bizarro sex, drugs, violence, and unpleasant body odors you could want, but Rutherford's street poet soul truly shines in his non-confrontational scenes of weary, average-shitty-day chit-chat amongst his going-nowhere protags. There's not much good to see in these people, but Rutherford sees them all the same, feels for them, and inexplicably makes you feel for them as well. He's the benevolent Watcher of the Damned who grants them the mercy even Christ might balk at. What do all their interwoven crime schemes add up to? Damned if I know, and yet there wasn't a moment when I didn't feel I was absolutely right there beside them.
L.A. Stories (Uncle B. Publications) is a collection of three interconnected novellas written by Alec Cizak, Scott Rutherford and Andrew Miller, respectively, with an introduction by Rex Weiner that firmly sets the tone for the mayhem to follow. This book is everything it purports to be, with the cover design of a VHS porn tape, populated by prostitutes in various sleazy stances whose looks are less “come-hither” than “come on down.” Indeed, L.A. Stories pulls readers down into the gutter, through back streets and cheap motels where dirty deals are orchestrated and executed. Equally dirty are the secret and no-so-secret lives of the corrupt who pose as “moral betters” of society, both the purveyors of entertainment and salvation, whose proclivities, from the gastronomical to the sexual, make the streetwalkers plying their trade look positively wholesome.
Set in late ‘70’s/ early 80’s Hollywood, at the dawn of the Reagan era, with twin threats to free speech as the right’s “silent majority” finds its strident voice and the left’s “political correctness police” seek to rein in the excesses (or is it the freedoms?) of the waning “Me Decade,” Alec Cizak’s “The Temple of the Rat” drops us in a part of L.A. that’s far more grit than glitter, but nevertheless, the Hollywood aura beckons the bright and ambitious, damaged and distorted alike, including a mentally ill homeless combat veteran and zealous evangelical Christians imposing their twisted world views on others. It holds in its orbit washed-up Hollywood execs trying to claw their way back into the good graces of the powers-that-be, and shines a light on shadowy vermin-infested structures where the up-and-coming elite indulge in bizarre rites symbolic of the imminent devolution of American democracy. If some aspects border on the polemic, one need only look around to see this at turns as both a realistic and an allegorical tale of What’s to Come.
Scotch Rutherford’s “The Roach King of Paradise” is a return to straight-up crime-fiction territory, with a colorful cast of criminals, misfits and hippy-esque do-gooders drifting in and out of the Paradise Motel, a hell-hole of an address and for the unfortunate girls being trafficked there, a dungeon. Gangsters in their glittering rides float in and out of the parking lot, crooked ex-cops show up to get their fixes, and the management seeks to maximize profits with minimum interference, enlisting the help of the “Roach King,” a shadowy figure part exterminator, part hit-man, to maintain order. Rutherford manages the various activities at the Paradise with cinematic ease, drifting in and out of its rooms amid scenes of varying degrees of depravity, from which one rare instance of compassion stands out in this harsh world as especially memorable.
Andrew Miller’s “Lady Tomahawk” caps off the narrative grindhouse with a buffed-out heroine who lives up to her name and turns on its ear the notion of the innocent girl who comes to Hollywood with stars in her eyes. Film and fashion references streaming throughout this section herald the coming decade of, up until then, unparalleled greed. The behind-the-scenes view glimpsed here of rampant hypocrisy might seem over-the-top in tamer times, but these are not tame times. Like in Gore Vidal’s novel, Hollywood, about how American power and influence migrated west with the rise of cinema to make La-la Land a twin capitol, here that concept is sexed-up, debauched and left ship-wrecked in bloody sheets while the perps shower and go to church.
A far cry from most cultural time capsules of this transformational era such as the free-wheeling college kids turned earnest yuppies of The Big Chill and even the human fall-out of the transition from old-school porno to videotape in Boogie Nights (yes, I’m aware these are movie references, but hey, this is Hollywood), this decadent romp through L.A.’s underworld, at turns violent and profane, humorous and profound, put me in mind of a late-night underground movie that I know might give me bad dreams but I can’t stop watching until I see how it ends.
Grindhouse is an American term for a movie theater that mainly showed low-budget horror, splatter, and exploitation films. The three novellas that make up L.A. Stories, Temple of the Rat, The Roach King of Paradise, and Lady Tomahawk are the prose equivalent. If you’re looking for stories that involve violence, murder, cannibalism, incest, and more, this is the collection for you. Reading these novellas reminded me of a line David “Noodles” Aaronson says in the film Once Upon a Time in America when another member of their gang, Max, suggests they elevate their operation. Noodles refuses, and Max tells Noodles that Noodles will carry the stink of the streets with him for the rest of his life. “I like the stink of the streets. It makes me feel good,” Noodles says. As I read these stories, I was reminded of that line. As someone who enjoys the grindhouse, these novellas were right up my alley. There’s something for everyone in these three stories, which are connected through a through-line of the location, time, and conservative radio-host Hank Shepard. For someone who is well versed in pop culture, I enjoyed the subtle references to films like American Gigolo, more obvious references to Halloween, and subheadings that are also titles of songs by Black Sabbath. If you’re looking for a triple feature from the grindhouse, then look no further than L.A. Stories. The fact they were written by contemporary authors is even better because it means I’ll be able to read more from them in the future.
A gnarly novella trio that provides a candid glimpse into the L.A. underworld and beyond, is well-written, and not for the faint of heart.
Cizak’s main characters in Temple of the Rat—Matthew Roberts and the cannibal couple—and the furnace scenes associated with them, legitimately creeped me out. I liked how the story bounced between snippets of the Hank Shepherd show. The switch in host was clever and a solid way to end the novella.
As a flash reader and writer, I had a strong appreciation for Rutherford’s The Roach King of Paradise. The chapters are short and almost mini-flash vignettes loosely tied together with sordid characters up to no good in the greater L.A. area. The titles of each chapter provided guideposts and carried the reader through the novella well.
Miller’s Lady Tomahawk caught me by surprise quite a few times. The writing is strong, and I was happy to see the opening Orange County setting (anyone who has spent time in Southern California knows of the symbiotic relationship between L.A. and Orange counties). I thought this was a solid piece to close out the show. As they say, last but not least.
In all three novellas, I enjoyed revisiting so many of the locations I knew, loved, and hated during my time in the area. The authors accurately captured the geography, local knowledge and slang (e.g., June Gloom, “University of Spoiled Children”), time (e.g., Betamax, Tab soda, rise of Reagan, & “that whacko from Indiana who’d killed his followers with Kool-Aid”), and level of crime and debauchery that the SoCal area is known for, especially during the era depicted. Overall, I thought L.A. Stories was a unique blend of Bukowski, Palahniuk, Tarantino, Frank Miller, maybe even a little Donald Ray Pollack, with a splash of John Fante. If you like any of those authors/directors (they are some of my favs for this genre) and enjoy unapologetic extreme crime fiction, this collection of novellas is for you.
An excellent no-holds-barred trilogy of connected novellas by three quality authors. There are plenty of unpalatable social truths laid bare in this set, and all gloriously and riotously entertaining.
The subtext is evident with the first of three novellas in this gritty anthology. The novellas read as a sort of a prequel to these modern times. The setting is possibly one of the sleaziest periods in the City of Angels, so authentic you’d think it was written back in 1979-80, and this seems to be where the seed was planted that grew into these current times. Alec Cizak’s Temple of the Rat sets the tone for the rest of the book. This is a collection of gritty novellas, written by three writers, each different from the other but maintaining a conceptual continuity. It’s all set in the sleazy underbelly of LA of the late 70's and the immorality that had set in, brewed into a nefarious stew. You know when Ronald Reagan shows up as a villain you’re in deep into this sweaty, surreal decent down a dark sewer drain. The ambience of foulness and depravity is felt on every page. The movie references are on point for the end of that decade, which makes this anthology feel of its period. This collection feels like a time capsule from the 70's was unearthed to expose the worms of a long-gone era that established this current political and social morass.
Three fiery grindhouse novellas indulging the best its depraved cast of miscreants can muster. All set in 1979, the collective unifying elements: American society’s bent to live in the past and revel in the narrow-minded playbook of rising stars like Hank Shepherd, whose hate radio aims to take us back where those in the know, know we belong. This trio of escapist fantasies exploit the worst decadence of decades past in engaging, beautifully brutal prose. Too bad the retrogressive mantras thoroughly skewered here, keep coming back.
With this kind of anthology, it's hard to decide whether you should review each novella based on its own virtues or the concept as a whole. I went for the concept as a whole for a variety of reasons. For instance, expressing my thoughts about each one of them might send an unintended message of covert favoritism that would not be fair to the synergy of the concept at large. Although I believe that each of these three novellas is a brave and brilliant accomplishment on its own merits and you could read them independently and still appreciate the same aspects, there is an element, a tangible atmospheric reality that flows through all of them beyond the common recurring character. If you have experienced L.A., even for just a few hours, all three novellas, in their own unique ways, are evocative of that kind of disconcerting atmosphere. There are many stories out there that could be set in just about any urban center in the United States of America and for folks like me, who grew up overseas, at times, all urban US landscapes "look the same", but not this one. This is quintessential L.A. I would also recommend re-reading this anthology every 5 years, which is what I do with originally controversial films (I've done that with Blue Velvet since I was a teenager). The characters and scenery of this trilogy will evolve with you. You can say that that's true for art at large but, from my perspective, it is particularly important when it deals with fellow humans in L.A. In my view, the approach to character is what differentiates the three novellas. They can range from the most symbolic and universal, whether that was intended or not, to the most concrete. And I insist, even with character in mind, it had to be L.A. Why? Because no matter where you grew up, if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, regardless of what language you spoke, in every local lore and vernacular, L.A. was translated as the final destination of a pilgrimage, which, for many, happened to be the ultimate measure of their self esteem. In New York, if you don't make it, there might still be a path to redemption, not in L.A., well at least not in the popular lore. In our Western culture, L.A. has been written as an "all or nothing" gamble. In these novellas you are going to see, hear, and smell how losing that gamble looks, sounds and smells like. Have you ever wondered what would happen if Patrick Süskind in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer told you every single graphic detail of what Grenouille is capable of and will actually do if "need be"? Well, unlike Süskind, these 3 authors will not refrain. They will make zero concessions. Keep that in mind. Yet, this is not only a narrative for fans of the genre. I'm not your typical genre reader and you would hardly ever catch me reading this level of graphic (probably similar themes, just not that level of graphic). I tend to read old school classics that you would find in most high school and freshman college lit classes, both European and American or gritty psychological thrillers from all over the world. Yet this collection and other books published by this same house transcend the genre. If I could time travel back to Madrid in 1996 and bring an item with me to one of my post war and contemporary US lit classes, I would bring this trilogy and compel the department to have it added to the syllabus for the class where we were mandated to read Naked Lunch and The Crying of Lot 49. Last but not least, all of this work is very cinematic. It almost feels as if it was written with the ultimate goal of producing a series or motion picture, so I really hope that one day I can also review them on IMDb.
While I’m old enough to remember the urban sleaze zones of 1979, I was still at an age where I was on the outside looking in, encountering God Squads on the street who were handing out religious comic books and trying to save me from whatever was beyond all that neon and glitter. Well, if you’re curious, as was I, the three interconnected novellas of L.A. Stories will take you to the other side with the perfect grindhouse three-way.
In another time, Temple of the Rat (Alec Cizak), The Roach King of Paradise (Scotch Rutherford), and Lady Tomahawk (Andrew Miller) would surely be headlining a drive-in near you with three features revolving around brutal physical violence, cannibalism, drugs, prostitution, pimping, incest, and every last whim of Hollywood. Except the end of the drive-in is nigh, even in 1979 when sleaze is king, as characters in this collection discuss.
Yet another thread stitching these three substantial pieces together is religious talk show radio-host Hank Shepherd, who’s so disgusted by the movie Caligula that he walks out of the theater after 90 minutes. Next, he’s off to preview Deep Throat. He’s just doing research, see, so as he can advise his listeners to steer clear of these and other abominations.
The façade of Shepherd’s on-air life is about to collide with the half-world of his considerable real-life peccadillos, but nobody loves a spoiler. Suffice to say that, even in hindsight, Cizak, Rutherford, and Miller are writing about matter they really aren’t supposed to be writing about in the here and now. As such, they are out of step with contemporary literary culture. I believe that’s exactly where great art starts, which is why people will look back on this book long after our societal dust settles to see what people were really doing in the dark some 44 years ago.
And don’t let the salacious subject matter fool you. L.A. Stories is smart concept, well executed, and populated by heady characters, even if the odd one, you know, actually loses their head. That’s the thing. This is one of the books they are warning you about. It is unsanitized. That’s exactly what makes it such an important document of the excessive time and place that was 1979.
I've read Jane Austen, John Updike, and Ross Macdonald with complete satisfaction, sipping my small, tulip-shaped glass of port before a flickering fireplace while flipping pages with my other hand. These three inter-connected novellas about a sleazy world I hardly know went down rapidly, and left me sweating as I gobbled port by the tumbler. There is art in this sort of thing, and it's on display here. All three lashings felt wonderful, and reflected each other just enough. One of the three was my favorite, but that's my business.
Of all the books claiming to somehow be grindhouse, this one can honestly claim that title. Three novellas, all grimy and gross like a grindhouse movie theater. I am not the biggest fan of sex, violence, and foul language, and this book has all this things in excess.
Encroaching on what is impossible with reality and line Alec Cizac takes us on a mind numbing circling romp not wanting to get off or even noticing the zip line fantasy he soon paints. Hard edgy and rancor a heightened periscopes view of Hollywood like a mind warp for sure. Five stars -ts