The Hollywood Spiral

Contributors

By Paul Neilan

Formats and Prices

Price

$13.99

Price

$16.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around June 15, 2021. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

From the author of Apathy and Other Small Victories, this darkly comic novel set in the near future about the race to find a missing cyber program with the power to bend reality—all before a fast-approaching comet destroys the earth.
 
In the near future, after the internet grinds to a halt amid a wave of cyber-attacks, a company named Zodiac steps in to replace it with an evolved, augmented-reality version called The Grid.
 
Harrigan, a hard-drinking private detective living as off-Grid as possible, is about to be evicted from his apartment when a stranger shows up asking for his help in finding Anna, an escort who he claims he's desperately in love with. Turns out that through Harrigan's new client, Anna has come into possession of a program/entity called Mirror, Mirror, which has the capacity to merge The Grid and reality, bending both to the whims of the program's user.
 
Soon Harrigan finds himself up against the last surviving organized crime gangs in Los Angeles, Zodiac's mercenaries, and a mysterious group called The First Church Multiverse, all of whom are hot on the trail of Mirror, Mirror—if the comet rapidly approaching Earth doesn't kill them all first.

Genre:

  • PRAISE FOR THE HOLLYWOOD SPIRAL: 
  • “Neilan makes this dystopian and unsettling world feel frighteningly real. Fans of Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music will be enthralled.”
    Publishers Weekly
  • “A real treat…An enthusiastically imagined world and a cast of vividly realized characters…Humorous [and] delightful.”
    Booklist
  • PRAISE FOR APATHY AND OTHER SMALL VICTORIES:

    "Comprising 50% sheer brilliance, 50% distilled cynicism, and 50% coronary-inducing humor, Apathy and Other Small Victories has more life, laughs, and story on every page than should be possible."
    Max Barry, author of Lexicon
  • "Neilan's wit is a razor that cuts and slashes mercilessly on every single page, in every single paragraph, so that your fingers will bleed even as the tears of laughter soak your face. So basically, you'll be reduced to a bloody, weeping mess, madly reading whole pages aloud as friends and family shake their heads and slowly back away."
    Jonathan Tropper, author of This is Where I Leave You

On Sale
Jun 15, 2021
Page Count
336 pages
ISBN-13
9781538736661

Paul Neilan

About the Author

Paul Neilan grew up in New Jersey before fleeing the Garden State for its polar opposite: Portland, Oregon. A graduate of Rutgers University, he worked a mind-numbing job in an insurance company where he spent much of his time asleep in the bathroom dodging his boss and his coworkers. It was in the uniquely creative zone of the stall of that men's room, legs akimbo and drool puddling on the linoleum floor that he began to hatch the idea for his first novel, Apathy and Other Small Victories. He still writes best in the bathroom.

Learn more about this author