Product Description

Dan and his wife Evie had buried the past a past in which Dan was a poet and a member of a radical cult which the FBI eventually hunted down and destroyed. Now in a world without a past, in a land of celluloid dreams, what was once killed has come alive again...Jude - his lover, his inspiration, his past has returned. But Jude has been dead and buried for along time. Now she has come back for his family and his soul. And as the hot winds blow down the mountainside, the flames begin to lick at the California sky. SALES POINTS: Etchison's previous novel from Raven, SHADOWMAN, received wide coverage and critical acclaim; Etchison is a contemporary of Stephen King, James Herbert and Clive Barker. Acclaimed for his short stories, the author has now turned his talent to novels and should receive the attention and readership he deserves; In the US Etchison's sales are on par with Robert R McCammon and Dan Simmons. THE AUTHOR Dennis Etchison is a multiple winner of the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards. He has been called "America's premier writer of horror stories".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2550939 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Customer Reviews

Forced, contrived, and unsatisfying
Finishing this novel was like waking up from a dream. When you dream, crazy things happen to you that seem sort of real yet really weird and illogical at the time, and it doesn't take long to forget the whole thing once you wake up. California Gothic features a disjointed narrative and a rather shaky plot. I really don't understand what Etchison's vision or intention was in writing this novel. Dan and Evie are happily married with one son, Eddie. Before Dan met Evie, his former girlfriend went gung ho over an anarchist resistance group and ended up dead at the hands of government agents. Out of the blue, Dan gets a message from his dead old flame announcing she is coming to take what is hers. Once she gets there, things get weird for everyone. Dan and Evie run around in circles, son Eddie and his fellow horror fan friend try to film their own horror film in the local salvage yard (with the mystery girl from Dan's past as the star), and each chapter seems to have its own separate reality. Some people end up dead, and then book finally winds down to a welcome yet lackluster ending. A lot of what these characters did made little sense to me, especially when two different versions of the same event started appearing in the murkier waters of the denouement. The writing itself does little to make up for the shaky plot. I found many of Etchison's descriptions to be rather contrived and wooden; in fact, he overdoes his descriptions to the point that they often become rather absurd.

Individual chapters did not really seem like different stories, but they also weren't connected to each other well enough to satisfy me. A lot of things struck me as quite goofy if not nonsensical in these pages, and the dialogues were too often forced and artificial. I never really connected with any character, so I never really cared what happened to any of them. This book won't bore you to tears or make you hurl it across the room, but it is far from compelling reading. I would be inclined to ask Etchison to take his manuscript with him and bring it back to me when it is actually finished.