Mulholland Drive in Fiction Form

I’m not sure if I even liked this book but I’m fascinated by it.

I’ve never tried bizarro fiction. It’s not a genre that appeals to me. But when I saw this on a list of weird crime novels from the irreplaceable CrimeReads.com website, I figured I’d give it a chance since I love LA noirs. I went in with low expectations, knowing this isn’t the kind of thing I normally read.

And while I don’t have a desire to try more bizarro fiction, I really enjoyed the writing of Laura Lee Bahr. She’s got excellent prose and while I had no idea what was going on half the time, even to the end, I still couldn’t wait to read it because she’s so talented. When you’re tossing out comfort for the sake of turning pages, that’s when you know you’ve found a good writer.

Trying to summarize this is impossible but I guess it’s kind of about a woman who committed suicide in a bathtub in Los Angeles. She’s perhaps famous. A journalist is trying to write about her. A third guy, whose perspective is written in the second person, lives in her old apartment. And there’s a bunch of wacky, hallucinatory stuff that happens. Or maybe happens. Or doesn’t happen at all.

Reading this reminded me of Roger Ebert’s glowing review of Mulholland Drive: “The movie is hypnotic; we’re drawn along as if one thing leads to another–but nothing leads anywhere, and that’s even before the characters start to fracture and recombine like flesh caught in a kaleidoscope. Mulholland Drive isn’t like Memento, where if you watch it closely enough, you can hope to explain the mystery. There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery.”

That totally explains this book. It’s like reading a novelized David Lynch screenplay written by a competent author. I don’t know if I’d recommend this to anyone but if you are indeed curious, you owe it to yourself to check it out.