Zeroville
By Steven Erickson
Europa Editions $14.95, 329 pages

It is the summer of 1969 – the year of Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy – and a young man called Vikar arrives in Hollywood. That same night, a series of wild murders take place in a house on Cielo Drive, and Vikar is briefly arrested as a suspect. He is, of course, innocent – the murders on Cielo Drive were famously committed by Charles Manson’s “family” of drop-outs. But Vikar is nevertheless an unsettling, suspicious figure. He has a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor on his shaved head: “… the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies, she the female version of him, and he the male version of her’’. This is a typical construct from Steve Erickson’s new novel, Zeroville, in which movies offer an almost spiritual vision of perfection, and everything on earth is a lesser copy.