A Life in Cinema — Mick Garris

A Life In the Cinema is the first book from award-winning filmmaker Mick Garris. This collection of eight prickly tales and a screenplay reach under the skin of real life and reel life to take you places you never realized you wanted to go. The title story, "A Life in the Cinema" and its sequel, "S********r", are set in the author's hometown of Hollywood, and provide a yellow-jaundiced look at a world you only thought was glamorous.

As Stephen King, in his introduction, says: "Here is a real Hollywood insider writing about the real inside world of filmmaking: the good, the bad, and the cheesy. These stories are both erotic and cynical, but they are above all well and fiercely told-when he's yarning about the tarnished tinsel underbelly of the town he knows (and clearly loves) the best, Mick Garris writes like a combination of Robert Bloch and James Ellroy, hardboiled noir with a ghastly little prick of the devil's own pitchfork."

Not all of the stories are Hollywood-based: Garris includes tales of a grandmother who is just as loving in death as she was in life, a geriatric trailer park with a randy secret, wistful and impossible love with a twist, the wrong kind of baby-love, and a deathly brush with fame. The book is capped with a screenplay by Garris, as well as "Chocolate", the story it's based on, providing, as King puts it, "a textbook seminar in the art and craft of adapting one's own work."

So welcome to a dark side of Hollywood you've never seen before...