Erickson, a cult novelist praised by no less than Thomas Pynchon, is also Los Angeles Magazine’s film critic, and he pours his encyclopedic knowledge of 1970s Hollywood into this funny, unnervingly surreal page-turner, in which burglars wax eloquent about “Now, Voyager” and the ghost of D. W. Griffith haunts the Roosevelt Hotel. I can’t say I understand everything Erickson is up to—don’t ask me why the chapters run up to 226 and then back to zero—but it doesn’t matter. Every page will set off fireworks in any movie lover’s head.
