About the Book
FROM KIRKUS REVIEWS: "An entertaining, kinetic supernatural tale with surprises and a genial hero."
- Kirkus Reviews
A UC Berkeley senior's journey to see his romantic interest sends him on a terrifying, otherworldly detour in this dark comedy-fantasy.
San Diegan Martin Brown, home for summer, dreams of a career as a film industry writer. From a job shoveling mulch at a garden store near home, he visits Los Angeles production companies. In L.A., Martin meets attractive and personable Chloë Setreal at Alienopolis, producer of fantasy books, games, and movies.
Martin and Chloë instantly fall in love. Chloë soon calls him for a job interview-a chance to meet again. Martin hops in his car for a quick two-hour drive up the coast, but a huge Pacific Ocean rain storm crashes with thunder and lightning, and car trouble strands Martin near Solana Beach. Drenched, he walks to the nearest house for help (or hell?) in a hypothetical Psycho sequel by Alfred Hitchcock. And so begins Martin's dark odyssey.
A leisurely two-hour drive becomes a 36 hour nightmare getting crazier by the hour. Martin flees from one ramble to the next, eastward to the Salton Sea, to Bombay Beach, to a fundamentalist camp where kidnap victims harvest marijuana, to a sex resort used by fake evangelists, corporate republicans, and other crooks serving the deep oligarchy. Martin escapes on water skis towed by fellow escapee (petty crook) in a motorboat.
Along the journey, Martin has brief, cryptic cell contacts with Chloë, who is laid up in L.A. with a broken leg and begs him to hurry. She longs for him. Martin pledges to see her at any cost, flying into the snowy mountains east of L.A. for deepening terrors involving zombies, aliens, and other unusual persons... and ultimately back to L.A. tattered and half-dead to reach Chloë, who had a scare of her own.
As in famous dark comedies like After Hours (Martin Scorsese), From Dusk Till Dawn (Quentin Tarentino), Chloë remains a beautiful, loving, delightfully aloof sort of goddess figure to whom Martin must journey through fantastic adventures, like Ulysses in Homer's Odyssey.
Read full Kirkus Review inside cover: "...Argo excels at pacing, as his story begins leisurely and becomes increasingly frantic and unpredictable... Martin traverses a hellish underworld so startling that reaching Chloë is a goal worth cheering for."
