The Star Stalker

In the prolific and versatile output of Robert (author of The Scarf and some others) Bloch, The Star Stalker (1968) stands as something of an anomaly. It is neither horror nor science fiction; nor, despite the title, is it an actress-and-maniac romance of psychological suspense. In keeping with Hollywood screen values, there is a melodramatic climax in which a gun does go off, though to less than devastating effect; but for most of its length the book is a period tale of a young man's adventures in the screen trade.

The action takes place in the nineteen-twenties, among the Hollywood generation that produced the films of Bloch's own childhood. The narrator's progress from teenage gofer to top-tier scenarist takes place alongside the metamorphosis of the early studios' carnivalesque free-for-all into a factory floor presided over by dead-eyed accountants and dead-headed production executives. In the astrological bent of a Great Director, as well as in the young woman whose persona he tries to mould in the time-honoured fashion, Bloch creates neat parallels for the all-too-extinguishable stars in his young hero's eyes.

Bloch's distinctive style, combining hard-boiled brevity (one recalls that Hollywood was also home to Philip Marlowe) with paronomaniac clown-at-midnight cackles, has rarely been better, and conjures the collective madness of the dream industry as effectively as his most famous work conveys the individual madness of the homicide. With admirable concision Bloch delineates his characters' varying combinations of hucksterish frenzy, cock-eyed idealism and unpleasant secrets, and delivers a sardonic meditation on the advantages and perils of believing one's own ballyhoo. What this book's characters share with those in Bloch's suspense and horror novels is their precarious dance between illusionism, delusion and reality; the knives wielded here may be purely metaphorical, but film cuts can still wound, as can paper cuts from a back-stabbing hack in the press. After his exhausting decade in Hollywoodland, the protagonist is finally relieved to find himself practising a more mundane profession; albeit one that, according to Bloch's "That Hell-Bound Train", is not quite reputable enough for the Devil.

I believe Bloch planned further novels charting Hollywood's mutations through subsequent decades, and it's a pity that he never managed to produce them. Since The Star Stalker was retitled (inaptly and without Bloch's consent; his own title was Colossal) and marketed as a suspense novel, and was later reprinted alongside two actual suspense novels in a collection called Screams, its pursuit of an appreciative readership has presumably been less than stellar. Arguably, given its subject matter such a fate is appropriate enough; but even so, like many films from the silent era, a regrettable loss.