Auto Erotica

Fiction. Winner of the fourth annual Tartt First Fiction Award. A neurotically jealous band of celebrities' children cruelly abandons one of their pack in the desert. A recovering nymphomaniac plots to kidnap her daughter from a religious cult she deems embarrassingly bland. A stage mother starves her daughter into permanent prepubescence then uses her to perpetrate a child abuse scam. Two call girls who operate as a fake twin act suspect each other of murdering their johns. On the dark fringes of Hollywood's sparkle live the eternal strivers, the unsung unknowns whose unquenchable ambition and ambivalent compliance in their own exploitation fuels America's dream factory. These characters are connected by their tangle of deluded grandeur and wrenching resilience. They are heroines who give a contemporary voice to the mysterious, dangerous, devoid-of-inner-life femme fatales who have long been central to the city's identity through their shadowy roles in the classic L.A. tales of Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Charles Bukowski, and Bret Easton Ellis. AUTO-EROTICA is a black valentine to the city of angels.