In preparation for the upcoming release of our debut novel, ‘City of Paradise’ on Amazon Kindle this week, we have been lucky enough for the legendary hellion of fiction Jonathan Shaw to grace us with a review as badass as the man himself. We thank Mr Shaw for taking the time out during his intensive work on the french-translation edition of his opus ‘Narcisa – Our Lady of Ashes’ to read and review for us.
City of Paradise
‘A hold-onto-your-balls roller-coaster ride to damnation’
By Jonathan Shaw
You’ve gotta love any novel whose prologue ends with the following chilling declaration by its unforgettable, all-too-familiar, hydra-headed narrator:
“My name is Kelly-Lee, and this is how I destroyed my life.”
But City of Paradise is more than a book about the rise and fall of the Gutterpunk Kings, or the predictable, formulaic misadventures of a group of starry-eyed misfits following a slime-coated trail to Hollywood, the land of Cash and Prizes; more than a tale of Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll.
This book is a lyrical, poetic magna opus that tunnels like a voyeuristic grave-digger into the dark, festering underbelly of the human condition.
You will both love and hate its protagonists, Blake, Snakes, Kelly-Lee, the “beautiful son-of-a-bitch”, Preswick, the Rainbow Haired Punk, Shanise and Dell. These characters are you and me and the guy down the block in the throes of a prolonged, hyperactive, drug-fueled anxiety attack. The ultimate bad hair day; but they’re real people, people like us, with all of our strengths and frailties, conflicted with a comic-tragic lust for life.
And away we go, stumbling blindly behind them, under the unbearable weight of their untenable dreams of glory, and passionate, fuck-the-world compulsions.
This book is also a Portrait of Dorian Gray of that apocalyptic modern-day Babylon known as Hollywood, as its author expertly, agonisingly vivisects La La Land in all of its pathological, narcissistic psychosis with a merciless, unrelenting surgical precision.
Sometimes it’s almost painful to march over such a broken, bloody battlefield, under a scratch-and-sniff smoggy sky of “botox and sex and health fanatics and sex and immigrants and palm trees and junk and Boulevards of Sunset and broken dreams and broken faces”, but ahh, it’s a sweet, wry sort of pain. A no-pain-no-gain proposition.
City of Paradise is required reading for anyone remotely interested in a fly-on-the-wall peek into behind-the-scenes Hollywood.
Not since Hubert Selby’s Requiem for a Dream has a book so unflinchingly, incisively plumbed the sweetly-scented, poisonous dungeons buried at the heart of the American Dream.
– Jonathan Shaw (Author of Narcisa – Our Lady of Ashes)
About Jonathan Shaw:
According to Johnny Depp, “If Hubert Selby Jr., Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neil Cassady, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the Marquis de Sade, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Edward Teach, Charley Parker, Iggy Pop, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, R. Crumb, Robert Williams, Joe Coleman, Dashiell Hammett, E.M. Cioran and all of the Three Stooges had all been involved in some greasy, shameful, evil whorehouse orgy, Jonathan Shaw would surely be its diabolical, reprobate spawn.”
Hollywood Gutterpunk 