Hollywoodski

This middling novel in stories from Matthews (Shaky Town) traces a screenwriter’s ups and downs in Hollywood. Dale Davis likes to describe himself as faded rather than failed (“Poets can fail. Screenwriters can’t fail, the bar is set too low,” he says to a fellow writer and drinking buddy in the title story, set in 2008). In “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others,” Davis gets the chance to direct his own script, a remake of Sam Peckinpah’s 1974 film Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia in Nicaragua, where the 1987 production is interrupted by insurgents and canceled by the studio before he can finish. His bad luck continues with the writers’ strike the following year, as he loses his agent and resorts to teaching and ghostwriting to make ends meet. In “Desperate Times, Desperate Crimes,” set in 2010, Davis tries to sell a remake of the 1972 blaxploitation movie The Thing with Two Heads, claiming the story of a terminally ill white surgeon who transplants his head onto the body of a Black man is the “lesson in race relations the country needs now.” The tales of Dale’s losing streak become repetitious, though some of them pop with life. Lovers of Hollywood lore will get a kick out of this. (Jan.)