AND INTRODUCING DEXTER GAINES: A Novel of Old Hollywood
MARK B. PERRY
Amble Press(non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook edition, available tomorrow
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: Emmy, Golden Globe, and GLAAD Award-winning writer Mark B. Perry deftly weaves fictional characters with well-known personalities of Hollywood’s golden age into this powerful and sparkling novel about the wages of flesh and sin.
HOLLYWOOD, 1952
Blessed with the smoldering good looks that destine him for the silver screen, the unfortunately named Dan Root arrives on the scene as a naïve but ambitious 21-year-old. Mentored and exploited by a powerful and dashing Svengali-like producer and his beguiling wife (a movie star whose career is on the tragic cusp between fame and fade out), Dan is transformed into the promising young actor, Dexter Gaines.
Soon their three lives become dangerously entangled by sexual awakening and unrequited love, but when their passion and deceit lead to a crushing discovery and attempted murder, Dexter is forced to choose between stardom and survival. Four decades later, a heartbreaking event compels Dan to return to the city of lost dreams and confront his past. It is only then he begins to unravel the twists and turns of a long-ago emotional mystery, to make peace with his past and his foiled chance at stardom.
Mark B. Perry's alternating timelines explore the corrosive confluence of fame, fortune, sexuality, and ill-fated romance in this captivating Capote-esque novel.
And Introducing Dexter Gaines: A Novel of Old Hollywood is a revised and retitled version of City of Whores from Amble Press, an imprint of Bywater Books.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: A book from ten years ago that I *vaguely* remember reading gets a glow-up. That's no doubt a good thing. I am far more sharply aware of this version of the story, and I'm very glad to say it deserved my sharpened attention.
I don't remember the cameos of real Hollywood stars anything like as clearly as they come across here, so I have to think those characterizations got a serious amount of attention...or my strokes ate more of my recall than I'm pretending to myself they did...either way, glamourous walk-ons like Tallulah Bankhead are such a joy to read.
The plot is a classic, an evergreen, and for a reason. It really happens. Read YOUNG MAN FROM THE PROVINCES: A Gay Life Before Stonewall if you want factual confirmation. There are so many memoirs from people whose beauty seduced powerful people into doing for them what they could not do for themselves, not always to their lasting benefit.
I don't think it will help you decide what to do about reading the story for me to run through the details. What I most want you to know is that, like all the best pulpy plots, this one hauled me along on each of its turns, implausible though I felt they were at times. I'm pretty sure I could find someone out there to whom even the most implausible things had honestly, in actual fact, occurred. Reality has that all over fiction: It isn't required to make sense.
There's intrigue, there's beautiful cinematically described settings and scenery...there to be chewed...there's exciting skulduggery in pursuit of...well, who really cares as long they're chewing the scenery with enough verve. I like a sudsy romantic read, and when it's also delivering commentary on period-appropriate homophobia and suchlike buffoonery, it's an extra win for this storytelling formula.
The missing star was lost in the time vortex between the 1950s and the 1990s. I really hate saying it out loud, but the 1990s were thirty years ago. *wince* A book about gay Hollywood set in two historical times that were both virulently homophobic felt...off, unbalanced, not to put too fine a point on it ill-judged.
Fun was had, though, and that ain't worth nothin' in today's horror movie of a world.
