27 Writers Answer: Your Favorite LA Novel

 

I love an LA novel. By way of introduction, I will not bombard you with my own relationship with Los Angeles. By way of introduction, I will not define a Los Angeles. I was born and raised and live and raise my own children and will die in an American South, far removed from the Chateau Marmont.

 

Los Angeles is both real and not, ephemeral and enduring. Images of Los Angeles, through the years, saturate our shared consciousness, direct from the lens of the finest and flimsiest auteurs. When an author sits down to write a Los Angeles, they are wrestling always with our own store of images. It is like this for any place, but it is like this more with Los Angeles.

 

Los Angeles is our last try, and the greyhound busses still drop off fresh cornhuskers and hillbillies every day, to dream and propagate and populate our imaginations. Los Angeles lives for the imagination.

 

There are two kinds of LA novels, and maybe even more than that. There is the glamorous Los Angeles. There is the grimy Los Angeles. And in both there is a grotesque Los Angeles.

 

And oh, those canyons, with their literary names and the way sound does (and does not) reverberate. Snarled freeways and car chases. Helter Skelter, Kato Kaelin, The Viper Room, Skid Row, the Musso and Frank Grill, flop houses, and infinity pools. Everyone and everything naked.

 

By way of introduction, I love an LA novel. Life is too short to read shitty books, so I asked some of my favorite authors, readers, publishers, booksellers, and friends to tell me their favorite LA novel. These are their stories:

• Alexandra Naughton (author of A Place A Feeling Something He Said to You, 2020 Spooky Girlfriend Press)

         

My favorite LA novel doesn’t feel like an LA novel– it doesn’t go the Hollywood route despite the references to movies and filmmaking scattered throughout, and it’s not another noir detective novel. I adore The Loved One because it’s dry as fresh cremains, morbidly hilarious, and features a love triangle between a British expat poet who’s a total cad, an uncultured mortuary beautician who consults a newspaper columnist for all her important life decisions, and her creepily gleeful middle-aged boss who lives over the thumb of his overbearing mother. Oh, and there’s a parrot funeral.

 

• Alexandrine Ogundimu (author of the novellas Desperate, Agitation, and Zeke, and the forthcoming novel The Longest Summer)

 

My LA novel is Play It as it Lays by Joan Didion.

 

I’ve never been to LA and have no idea if the LA sections constitute a versimilitudinous depiction of the city. My love of this text is born of its concision, its tightness. There’s nothing wasted, to the point it compresses itself into adamant beauty, a diamond of pure vice so brilliant it burns to look at it, even as it compels the reader.

 

• Allie Rowbottom (author of JELL-O GIRLS, Little, Brown, 2018; and AESTHETICA, Soho Press 2022)

 

BODY HIGH by Jon Lindsey

 

Though it’s been years, I still remember the first time. Sunday, sunset, on the couch in my faux tuscan prefab apartment in a Santa Clarita cul de sac. Palm tree shadows snuck across the carpet, the page, the words like wounds in pale flesh, a language of late summer light; I disappeared into their unity. 

 

• Brian Alan Ellis   (runs House of Vlad Press, and is the author of several books, including Sad Laughter (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018) and Hobbies You Enjoy (serialized daily on Instagram:  @hobbiesyouenjoy). His writing has appeared at Juked, Hobart, Fanzine, Mon­keybicycle, Elec­tric Literature, Forever Mag, X-R-A-Y, Heavy Feather Review, and Yes Poetry, among many other places. He lives in Florida)

 

My favorite LA novel (besides Body High by Jon Lindsey, which I published) is The Road to Los Angeles by the late, great John Fante, author of another important, and better known, LA novel, Ask the Dust, which was made into a hella mediocre movie in 2006, starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, but The Road to Los Angeles, Fante’s first novel, a prequel to Ask the Dust published posthumously, is his best work, in my opinion, giving an early, hungry voice to one of the great characters in literary history, Arturo Bandini, who navigates the poor, working class world with humor and truth, struggling to pay the rent while moonlighting as a would-be famous writer, ultimately influencing Bukowski, but doing it earlier, better and in less problematic fashion, coming off as a grittier and more juicy anti-Catcher in the Rye.

 

 

• Chandler Morrison (Author of Along the Path of Torment and Human-Shaped Fiends)

 

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

 

It should come as no surprise to anyone even half-familiar with me that my favorite LA novel is also my favorite novel of all time, and one that I reread every year without fail. Imperial Bedrooms perfectly embodies the dark, lonely glamor of the city, and its ghoulishly vapid and narcissistic characters are perhaps the most accurate representation of LA’s populace that’s ever been put to page. The spare prose cuts like a scalpel; there’s not a word out of place, and each sentence contributes to a chilly sense of simmering dread that keeps escalating until its gutshot finale.

 

• Chris Kelso (award-winning Scottish writer. His latest book, which he edited with David Leo Rice, Children of the New Flesh: the early work and pervasive influence of David Cronenberg is due out from 11:11 Press summer 2022)

 

High Life by Matthew Stokoe

There seem to be three visions projected over the canvas of LA:

 

• One is of La-La Land – a place of glamour and splendor; gorgeous people sunning themselves beneath canopies along Venice Beach. A place of perpetual sunshine. A place where dreams are made.
• Another is of the graveyard of cold, cool, oxycontin-addicted, washed-up, mentally ill Hollywood casualties – the tragic wannabes of Tinseltown you’ll find in Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis novels. Where dreams can become nightmares.
• Then there’s Matthew Stokoe’s High Life, which presents LA as a Grand Guignol of hedonistic hyper-violent excess. A place where nightmares eat dreams for breakfast.

 

This book truly shocked me. Also, the writing is so assured and crisp. There is a standard noir narrative hidden beneath the horror – there’s a man on a mission. He finds clues. But the scenes of deprivation are so memorable they become the thrust of the novel for me. When I got over the initial shock, I found myself willing every scene to one-up itself. Stokoe doesn’t disappoint. Like Bruce Wagner, he makes voyeurs of us all. It’s a book I will never forget. It’s not just an inversion of the Hollywood fantasy, the book is a literary dare.

 

• Claire Hopple (author of four fiction books, XRAY editor)

 

How to Get into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak

 

“…it scared me to think that these people might have had a clue once and then had just given up and started wearing khaki shorts.” This book showed me a side of LA I didn’t know existed. The characters are memorable and the sentences are sharp. 

 

• Cory Bennet (lives in Ohio with his wife and stepson)

 

I was introduced to Tony O’Neill by my wife, Mila. I read Digging the Vein while in rehab in Vallejo, California. It’s autofiction, it’s unsentimental, it’s not corny. Everything sucks and I love it.

 

 

• Danielle Chelosky (writer with work in Hobart and X-R-A-Y Lit)

 

My favorite LA novel is My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes.

 

I could have picked The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West because they are both entrenched in the same themes of disillusionment portrayed through ill-fated young women who see Hollywood as a vessel through which they can achieve their dreams, but Hayes is a lyrical, evocative writer whose 1958 novel is able to find love and intense feeling amongst the cynicism even if it does not end well. Hayes is critically underrated and incredibly skilled at showing the human tendency toward despair be mended by the persistent, irresistible sliver of hope that comes and goes.

 

• Derek Maine (CHAR  ACT    ERS, 2022 Expat Pres)

 

I love an LA novel. I love Dreams of Bunker Hill by Fante because he wrote it poolside, dictating it to his wife, legless and dying, and it remembers a Los Angeles and I am obsessed with memory and I am scared of Los Angeles. I love an LA novel. I love Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis because he wrote it in the present tense, as it was happening, as a teenager. There was no leakage or time for memory to shine or spoil. But my favorite is The Grifters by Jim Thompson. It was also the first R rated movie I remember seeing, as I watched it uncomfortably in the sunken blue couch next to my father. He used to let me stay up and watch whatever he was watching as long as I didn’t bug him. I liked that a lot.

• Elizabeth V Aldrich (bonafide Valley Girl but makes up for it by being absolutely insane)

 

The Magician by Christopher Zeischegg is her favorite LA novel. Why? Because it is. It captures the dark magic of Los Angeles. it is, and she doesn’t need to explain why so much as you simply need to read it. Plus it has way more drugs than Less Than Zero. BACK TO FIRST PERSON:  I have spent a fuckton of time reenacting the Julian/$500 abortion scene at the Sherman Oaks Galleria and eating pie and coffee at Du-Pars. I stole Less Than Zero from Grover Cleveland High, where I went for a total of six months.

 

• Gabriel Hart (author of Virgins in Reverse/The Intrusion)

 

My favorite Los Angeles novel in most recent memory is “Permission” by Marc Kristal (Atmosphere Press, 2021). While largely overlooked, I wrote about it in LA Review of Books last February, where I hoped to get more eyes on this Nabokov-Noir. It’s premise only seems passé at first — a failing screenwriter descends into a maelstrom of drugs and prostitutes, but the layers it pulls back, and the tender cores that are revealed, the reader will never see coming. It’s incredible.
 

 

• Garrett Frame (author of Adult Situations and The Apprentices Supper)

 

Doc Sportello, stoned, wandering around the beaches and undercovering plots in a land where billionaires and dead bass players mingle, and Vegas is two bumps and a drive away if you’re feeling nasty. Inherent Vice is not the most representative LA novel, nor the finest. But it is my favorite. And the movie is even better. What’s more LA than that?

 

• Garth Miró (author of The Vacation, 2022 ExPat Press) 

 

Jon Lindsey’s Body High:

 

You should not read too many things about LA. There is a desperation there that seeps in, and soon you’re walking around examining seriously such ridiculous ideas as lifestyle. But read this book, and maybe only this book, and then call your dealer immediately.

 

• W Griffin Hancock (ceremonial eunuch-at-large)

Ruthless Little Things, by Elizabeth V. Aldrich – The only rule of being a great writer is “never stop doing hot girl shit”. Nobody understands this better than Eris. The first time I read this book, I had to stop halfway through for a cigarette and a nap, because it made me feel thoroughly post-coital.

 

• Jesse Hilson (author of Blood Trip, 2022 Close to the Bone)

My favorite LA novel currently would have to be The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories by Bruce Wagner which came out last year I think. I’ve loved Wagner’s novels about the stupendously wealthy and the struggling poor in Hollywood since I discovered him in the ‘90s. I would recommend any of his novels (in particular Force Majeure, Dead Stars, I’m Losing You), because LA is his chosen milieu and the books are dark, hilarious, illuminating, sad, and full of up-to-the-nanosecond pop culture currency and relevance about fame and wealth in America.

 

• Jon Lindsey (author of Body High, House of Vlad Press)

 

A lot of people will overthink this because the answer is clear as California light: Ask the Dust

 

• Josh Sherman (author of CHARM REDUCTION, a collection of poems and stories forthcoming on Gob Pile Press)

 

Eve’s Hollywood, the first book by Eve Babitz, is probably not a novel, yet it is often categorized this way — likely for simplicity’s sake, or maybe saleability. But format is beside the point. From the start, Babitz had her voice, and it’s the least contaminated by literary influence that I’ve ever come across. And, so, whenever I return at random to one of the scrappy vignettes in this “novel” of mid-century L.A., I’m eternally jealous of her raw talent, self-assurance, and style.

 

• Karter Mycroft (co-creator of the interactive fiction anthology Los Suelos, CA)

 

I’d probably have to say Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson. I listened to the audiobook shortly after I moved here in 2016, and remember being consistently awestruck by the sentence writing, the way Gibson twists and untangles his thoughts with such careful attention to rhythm and assonance. I was working a soul-sucking office job downtown at the time and would always catch myself pulling in late to a greasy 6th floor parking garage thinking “yes, this is me, this is my Sprawl”… Also, what a title!

 

• Liz Freeman (bookseller, writer, artist)

 

Girl Goddess #9 by Francesca Lia Block

 

I don’t remember the exact first time I encountered Francesca Lia Block’s Los Angeles (11, maybe 12) but I do remember that it was a lot like the San Diego I had known my whole life: dry wind that carried witchcraft, scraping your hands on boiling hot stucco, the sky in fluorescent layers of orange grey purple, the old cars permanently sun tanning in neighborhood driveways, the bougainvillea, the nasturtiums, the hills of ice plant, the rocky dry dirt in patches studded with broken glass and weeds which bloomed into yellow flowers which turned into dandelions which then blew apart …. that this adult, a published author no less, saw what I saw and deemed it worthy of sharing? That she wrote these stories and the people in them were freaks, musicians, artists; girls who had a single mom, like me?? Unfathomable. If this Los Angeles, her Los Angeles, was beautiful and strange and worthy then my place was, too. I was, too.

 

• Manuel A. Marrero (Founder/Editor-in-Chief Expat Press)

 

My choice is A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K. Dick. For a dystopian sci-fi novel, there is no more accurate depiction of the way tweakers think and communicate that has ever existed in literature. The narrator’s developing brain damage and his deteriorating connection with reality is harrowing and deeply relatable to anyone who’s ever been dependent on drugs. It is also a dizzying, cutting indictment of the drug war complex on a societal level, and captures the kind of paranoia Dick himself experienced hosting drug-addled parties in LA.

 

• Mila Jaroniec (author of Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover, Split Lip Press)

 

Charles Bukowski’s WOMEN is one of my favorite novels that happens to be an LA novel. I read it in a wine bar in Ohio, far away from racetracks and sun, before I found out I was pregnant. The absurdity and joyful despair kept my chin up through uncertainty and shock.

• Ryan Alexander (co-host, the VOLLMANNIA podcast)

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

Despite hailing from California, I’ve always resisted the allure of Los Angeles; San Francisco suited me better. James Ellroy transplanted his experience of his mother’s murder onto the killing of Elizabeth Short, and in so doing, created my favorite novel about my least favorite cultural capitol. Bucky’s grisly discovery on a beach clinched it for me – a transcendent flash of giallo neon amongst the monochromatic noir.

 

• Ryan Madej (writer, reviewer, editor. Recent book, Assassin 2021 Equus Press)

My pick for LA Novel is The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.

 

To me, The Long Goodbye epitomizes what the hardboiled detective novel should be: hot nights and cold women; whiskey and cigarettes; mystery and intrigue, but at the same time Chandler describes what I imagine old Los Angeles was like–or to put it more precisely, my ideal Los Angeles. The Los Angeles that exists outside of the real and can never corrode, disappear and fall into the ocean. A beautiful city until the sun goes down…a flash of light, a dream.

 

• Sofia Haugen (Sports Correspondent (Unofficial), The Last Estate)

 

Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (Neversoft/Activision, 2005) is a compelling narrative of crime, betrayal, lust, rebellion, justice, art, friendship, and (most importantly) skateboarding. While it is not, strictly speaking, or even loosely speaking, a novel, it is one of the truest expressions of the mid-2000s American zeitgeist, and its inexplicable punk-covers-by-emo-bands soundtrack was a massive contribution to my terrible taste in music.

 

• Stuart Buck (Author of Quantum Diaper Punks, eic Bear Creek Gazette)

I recommend Bruce Wagner’s Marvel Universe Origin Stories, a book about LA people being disgusting LA People. It’s about people becoming literal and metaphorical birds. It’s amazing and sick. Like the city itself.

 

• Troy James Weaver (Wichita Stories, Temporal, Visions, Marigold)

 

The Day of the Locust has perfectly rendered characters, in a stripped back yet poetic prose style. The beginning and ending are pitch perfect. It is one of those rare novels that retains a modernity almost a hundred years after it was first published and makes the case that Nathanael West was every bit as good a writer as his more well-known contemporaries.

 

• William Duryea (Editor-in-Chief, Misery Tourism)

 

My favorite LA novel is Ham on Rye, because at no point while reading it did I get the impression that Bukowski wanted me to feel that there was anything romantic, exceptional, demonic, or unique about Los Angeles, an overexposed city that makes me thankful that tax incentives exist to seduce and cajole Hollywood directors and television producers to occasionally film anywhere else. Ham on Rye is a novel full of banality, pettiness, and desperation, but there’s no indication that those traits are a function of the city where the novel is set; instead they expose a vacancy we all share: the vast distance between our pretensions and ideals and the vapid, ugly reality of living. Henry’s shitty, painful adolescence could be anyone’s, anywhere, at any time; his despair is universal.