In his latest novel, Los Angeles author Steve Erickson taps into cinema's mythology, lionizing both the god-like figures who cavort in the Hollywood Hills and cinema's potential for Jungian psychic expression. A novel for the movie-obsessed — Erickson sprinkles Zeroville with veiled allusions to actors and films — it stars Vikar, a Christian-born architecture student who falls in love with the movies and flees his conservative roots in Pennsylvania. Arriving in Hollywood at the time of the Manson murders, he bears two distinguishing tattoos: a red tear beneath his left eye and, etched across his shaved skull, a close-up of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in George Steven's A Place in the Sun. A repository of cinematic knowledge (a friend dubs him a "cinéautistic"), Vikar immerses himself in the industry, rising from a set builder to an acclaimed editor and nearly a director. Along the way, he falls for Soledad Palladin — the rumored daughter of Luis Buñuel — and her comically precocious daughter, Zazi.

Like Winston Groom's Forrest Gump, Vikar is an avatar for the baby-boomer generation: Erickson sets the plot of Zeroville against major historical and cultural moments of the late '60s (the moon landing) and the '70s (J. Paul Getty III's kidnapping and, later, the emergence of punk). Vikar also meets historical figures, including John Cassavetes and a young, pre-Taxi Driver De Niro.

In tangential story lines that echo famous movie plots, Vikar collaborates with anti-Franco revolutionaries in Spain, gains legendary status in the early New York punk scene for his violent participation (and tattoos), and searches for a long-lost print of Jeanne d'Arc in a mental institution in Oslo, Norway. Far-fetched adventures aside, Zeroville's real motive is to show film's representation of the collective unconscious — how the projected image taps directly into deep-seated, transhistorical archetypes. Late in the novel, the films Vikar sees end up haunting Zazi's dreams. Echoing Vikar's beliefs that "the Movies have always been there. The Movies were here before God," the story comes to an abrupt, mystical ending that bridges the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac, Taylor and Clift, and Vikar and Zazi.

-H.G. Masters