High Life — Matthew Stokoe

Fiction. Jack had gone to Hollywood with one ambition: to become famous, a star, exactly how he didn't care. He just wanted to be like the people whose lives he followed in gossip magazines...Instead he found a world more seedy than anything he could have imagined, a world of whores and deceit, snuff shows, incest, drugs-and despair. After his wife, Karen, a hooker, is murdered and disemboweled, he meets Bella, a beautiful woman of immense wealth. In her he sees a change to make his dreams come true. As it turn out, though, his nightmare is only beginning. "...An elaborately drawn, surgically accurate Hollywood dystopia..."-Ellen Miller. "Stokoe proves himself a worthy heir to the great tradition of California noir"-Henry Flesh.