Pandaemonium

Pandaemonium is the definitive novel of Hollywood in its most glamorous era, a work that examines the very roots of film itself, and their hold upon the dark, underground forces of instinct and imagination. Narrated by the ever-wise, yet sexually tormented Peter Lorre, this book assembles a huge cast of Hollywood types - moguls, agents, directors, stars and starlets, writers, gossip columnists and mere hangers-on - who converge on Pandaemonium, a Nevada ghost town, on the eve of World War II. There, they all fall under the spell of a great European film director named Rudolph Von Beckmann, whose secret plan is to turn a routine B western into an extraordinary film of Antigone, and so warn the world of the dictator who would destroy it. But in the heat of the desert and his own fevered imaginings, it is Von Beckmann who becomes the tyrant and - in an atmosphere that is part Armageddon, part Gotterdammerung - it is his world that is destroyed.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.