A key grip trying to write a script gets sucked into a strange conspiracy in this comic crime novel. 

Sam Agonistes does his own stunts. Not movie stunts, of course. Just the garden-variety, impulsive, middle-aged dude kind: “Like the time I got up on an overfilled recycling bin to stomp down the cardboard boxes and ended up flat on my back in the driveway....Or the time I decided the best way to get rid of the Christmas tree was to shove it in the fireplace and put a match to it.” A Hollywood grip–turned-screenwriter, Sam has the assurance that if he can simply compose the right script, superstar Shemahn will finance and star in the movie. The only problem? He hasn’t got the slightest idea of what to write. His writer’s block is interrupted by the appearance of a beautiful, much younger woman at his front door. Petunia Biggars tells him that she’s in danger and that he is too, though Sam—wary of a con job—sends her on her way. Sam is already distracted from dealing with his ex-wife and adult children, particularly his son, Atticus, whose anger is keeping him from professional and personal success. A few days later, some men in an SUV bearing Glocks show up, and Sam realizes that Petunia might have been correct. Luckily—or unluckily—Sam may be just the right kind of impulsive man to survive this outlandish Hollywood happening. Rowland’s (King Me, 2009) prose is laden with references to films and the people who make them—appropriate given the protagonist’s line of work. At one point, Sam muses: “Debbie Fisher practically potty-trained my daughter; Gregory Peck was an honorary godfather to our son….You get the picture. Sure, my Ex’s father wasn’t a Westmore—and her mother wasn’t a Salad Sister—but she had a hairstyling pedigree that predated Technicolor.” Some of the author’s stylistic choices, like the absence of quotation marks, make the plot a bit difficult to follow, but the beats will be recognizable to those familiar with fish-out-of-water crime novels. Similar to The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice, Sam’s tale is a slacker detective story that will likely appeal the most to men of his same generation and cultural reference points.

A gnarly, satisfying caper set among moviemakers in Hollywood.

A screenwriter follows a former employee to a strange resort in this comedic crime novel set in California.

Rowland follows up his previous work, Cinematic Immunity (2020), with another caper starring Sam “Samson” Agonistes. Sam is a “fifty-something bald guy” who formerly worked as a grip in Hollywood and is now a screenwriter. He runs Samson Productions with the activist-turned-screenwriter Petunia “Una” Biggars. Samson Productions is also the employer of an assistant named Ja’k. Ja’k is not very good at his job. Yet when Ja’k declares that he is quitting, Sam and Una feel that something is amiss. The suspicion proves correct when Sam follows Ja’k all the way from Los Angeles to a desolate place past San Diego called Rancho de Los Niños Perdidos. Though it claims to be a resort of sorts, Sam, whose knowledge of cinema includes a number of film noirs, can tell that all is not well. To make matters worse, Sam’s estranged son, Atticus, is involved. Atticus is the opposite of his Prius-driving, multiculturally inclined father. Atticus is a blatant racist with designs on a career in politics. He also tried to kill his father once. Can Sam figure out what is going on at Rancho de Los Niños Perdidos? Even better, can he lend a hand in stopping it? Although Sam’s trials involve some complicated family issues (which, aside from his son, include a veterinarian daughter and a brother-in-law who calls himself Guppy), events progress quickly. For a narrative that includes torture and some other difficult matters, it all occurs with a flair for the comical. Sam is the type of California driver who keeps a blow-up doll in his vehicle so he can use the carpool lane. Rather than be embarrassed by taking advantage of the loophole, he talks to his doll as if she were a real person. He even calls her Wifey. In other episodes, the dark kookiness can become too fantastical. A pivotal moment involves a normally friendly dog attacking a would-be rapist. The scene is neither particularly funny nor particularly believable. Nevertheless, Rowland’s engaging story remains tense throughout. Sam may be laughable at times, but he ends up dealing with some sufficiently dire situations.

This adventure offers an entertaining, if occasionally uneven, mix of the serious and the silly.

A screenwriter with a spotty child-rearing record copes with a bout of unexpected sightlessness in Rowland’s third book in a series, following Cinematic Immunity(2020).

Fatherhood can be a minefield, and no one knows that better than Sam Agonistes, who is, in his own words, a “key grip turned screenwriter, fiftyish white male who does all his own stunts, not exactly ‘woke’ for some, beyond all hope for others.” He finds himself in a disagreement with his family over what to do with the remains of his estranged son, Atticus—a White supremacist who recently died trying to kill Sam at the behest of a shadowy spymaster. In the end, Sam, his daughter, and ex-wife all decide to take a third of Atticus’ ashes home with them. Sam packages his portion in an old thermos and heads immediately to an appointment with a famed fertility doctor; he’s trying to have a baby with his girlfriend, hotel manager Achu Merchant. Much to his chagrin, the ghost of Atticus begins to speak to him in his car and in a small room where Sam is to provide a sperm sample. During ejaculation, Sam’s field of vision suddenly goes white. After a doctor can find no medical explanation, Sam must attend a deposition; his ex-brother-in-law has brought a wrongful death suit against him on behalf of Atticus. (Sam insists that his son was killed by a snakebite.) Will Sam’s mistakes with his first family prevent him from trying again with a second? He’ll have to do a lot of soul-searching about what it means to be a father—a task that’s only complicated by the interference of doctors, vengeful villains, litigious relatives, and a lack of vision.

Rowland’s prose, as narrated by Sam, is clipped in style and often funny, as when self-avowed stuntman Sam decides not to stop himself from falling over right after he loses his sight; the protagonist hits the ground in the span of a second: “Now those of you who don’t normally do stunts will see this as the instant to give up on what is clearly a dangerous activity, throw out my hands, and save myself…But saving myself in mid-air isn’t an option. It’s just not what stuntmen do. Even part-time-wannabe ones. We take pride in seeing things through.” The book continues to employ the stylistic elements of its predecessor with a reliance on short paragraphs, an absence of quotation marks or dialogue tags, and frequent movie references. It’s an abstruse world to enter at first, especially given that it builds so heavily on the plot of the previous novel. Returning readers may find this sequel slightly overlong and slow paced, due to its nebulous stakes and loose relationship to reality. That said, it’s certainly fun at times, as when a 20-page section at the end is formatted as a screenplay. However, Rowland’s refusal to make the novel a bit more reader-friendly may prove to be a barrier to accessing its hidden charms.

An obstinately offbeat riff on fatherhood.

A disfavored son launches a mission of reinvention in Rowland’s debut literary novel.

Junior “Junie” Bounderby is still seething over the fact that his older brother was able to buy the house next door to their parents’ place years ago. (His brother’s offer was selected over Junie’s equally legitimate offer—in part, he suspects, because their father intervened.) The multimillion-dollar houses are on Grandview, the town’s finest boulevard, and Junie has never been able to catch up to his family members’ level of wealth. Junie lives with his wife and two teenage children further down the hill in a less impressive house (on which Junie has barely been able to keep up the payments, due to a downturn in his small business). But Junie is a man of action. His motto is BFF, which in his idiolect stands for Best Foot Forward. “BFF means what Junie Bounderby says it means,” he tells his son, Trip, when the latter attempts to convince him the acronym already has universally acknowledged meaning. “That’s how my family operates. Putting our best foot forward is table stakes for us. We don’t have best friends. We don’t need best friends. Who needs best friends when we have our best feet? Best feet that we always put forward?” When his widowed mother goes to Florida for the winter, leaving her house empty, Junie picks the winter solstice—during a polar vortex, to boot—to sneak into the house in the middle of the night and plant something in his dead father’s office that will finally, he believes, make him whole. The only problem? A mysterious figure attacks him in the dark house. Junie kills the assailant in self-defense, then flees without knowing who it is. Is Bounderby’s new life plan ruined before it’s begun? Or can he BFF his way through fraud, murder, adultery, and more to be the best Bounderby yet?

Rowland writes from deep within Junie’s consciousness, more or less in real time. Junie spends the first eight pages of the novel trying to slip out of bed without waking his wife, and 15 pages walking to his mother’s house (with a brief detour to attempt to remove some offensive lawn jockeys from a neighbor’s front drive). This decompression of narrative time, along with Rowland’s habit of holding back orienting bits of information about Junie’s life and intentions, makes for a reading experience that is simultaneously humorous and suspenseful. The maximalist precision of the prose creates a rich and ridiculous texture, as here when Junie trips over something soon after entering his mother’s darkened house: “The chaos of all his mother’s unexpected detritus underfoot was dominoing him toward a mission-critical fall. But then somehow his windmilling arms met a droopy clothesline which provided enough resistance to keep him upright until this near downfall was prevented by a soft landing on the washing machine.” Bad decisions lead to worse ones and eventually to more violence. While readers may never really root for Junie, they’ll be happy to follow his every move.

A compulsive, comic, claustrophobic novel about resentment and ambition.

Trippy, wordy anti-authoritarian slacker yarn about the hapless heir to a L.A. media empire.

Veteran indie film producer Rowland adroitly taps his professional milieu for his debut novel, in which nothing is what it seems, and absolutely everyone is working an angle or has a pitch. Rowland’s gleeful, speedy prose–full of cinematic flashbacks, telling asides and casual dirty bombs–chronicles the surreal quest of K (King Random Henry, aka "Cur”), who is framed for assassinating his big-wig Dad (aka "Railroad”). All looks black for the young orphan, who must prove his innocence to a pair of inept, ambitious FBI agents and free himself from the clutches of a comic book-style terrorist ring mysteriously known as FLAN. Everyone wants something and usually it’s K’s head. But why did K’s mom commit suicide? Did he really lose his virginity? Who is the Hispanic housekeeper? K’s nihilist pose disappears early on–along with his signature "Why Bother?” T-shirt–but his every step is dogged by a mouthy imaginary friend named Jerry Lewis. Soon things go from merely confusing to serious-silly as each page reveals more of the blackly comic tale–a literary mash-up with enough multi-generational family betrayals, vaunting ambition, hidden agendas and shady plot twists to make even Dickens blush. But that’s the book’s charm. In true La La Land fashion, King Me’s improbable climax–heavily laced with King Lear references–includes both dramatic revelations and shocking reversals, but (almost) everyone lives happily ever after.

Utterly hilarious and highly recommended for pop-culture junkies, checkers buffs, fans of Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein, the French and aspiring screenwriters–and the people who hate them.