In an alternate Los Angeles, a young man uncovers a life-changing cinematic secret
Hailed as one of Erickson’s finest and most daring novels, Zeroville is a unique love letter to film. It centers on the story of Vikar, a young architecture student so enthralled with the movies that his friends call him “cinéautistic.” With an intensely religious childhood behind him, and tattoos of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head, he arrives in Hollywood where he’s mistaken for a member of the Charles Manson “family” and eventually scores a job as a film editor. Vikar discovers the frames of a secret film within the reels of every movie ever made, and sets about splicing them together—an undertaking that takes on frightening theological dimensions. Electrifying and darkly comic, Zeroville dives into the renegade American cinema of the ’70s and ’80s and emerges into an era for which we have no name.