What do the novelists Michael Connelly and James Ellroy have in common?
They’re both L.A. crime writers who are from the city they write about. Now we can add another writer to the mix. Nolan Knight is a fourth-generation Angeleno who has established himself as a neo-noir writer to reckon with over the course of two novels, The Neon Lights Are Veins and Gallows Dome, and the short story collection Beneath the Black Palms. And Knight’s new novel, The Gorgon of Los Feliz, is his most ambitious book yet.
The novel opens with a scene right out of a Raymond Chandler story: A distraught father goes into a sheriff’s station with a photo of his missing stepdaughter. His motive, however, isn’t so pure.
Richard Stevenson is the head of a Long Beach shipping company that’s about to go belly-up. He wants to borrow money from the trust established for his stepdaughter, Tiffany, to stave off financial ruin, but she has seemingly vanished into the petrochemical murk that hangs over the harbor like a curse. There’s legitimate reason for concern. Tiffany Stevenson is a wayward 23-year-old with a fondness for pills. She’s more interested in finding her purpose in life than spending her trust money. Richard fears his impressionable stepdaughter has run off with a musician, and he will do anything to find her.
Enter the Gorgon.
Cameron “Cam” Kilbride is a part-time DJ and full-time hustler. She’s queen of the party scene, and her currency is clout. As long as people think her gigs are the place to be, an army of online followers will line up to live vicariously through her. Cam has to feed the machine by constantly posting about her supposedly fabulous life, and the disparity between the glamour and the grind is wearing her down. She can get on any guest list in the city but is perpetually behind on her rent. With cash running low, she’s looking for a new hustle, a longer con that will sustain a new way to be in the world.
“Life got you down?” Cam thinks. “Time to re-invent yourself.” When Cam gets wind of Tiffany’s situation, she sees an angle, and if she works it right, she’ll ride off with enough money that it won’t matter what anyone thinks of her.
The Gorgon of Los Feliz is a nonstop thrill ride that travels all over the city, from overpriced studio apartments in Highland Park to Long Beach’s affluent Alamitos Peninsula, and has sharp things to say about all of it. For instance, as Richard comes to terms with his vanishing fortune, his surroundings take on new meaning: “The walk through Downtown Long Beach had a bite in the air, that marine layer now creeping through clogged arteries. Streets bustled with a soup of new wealth and old vagrancy, both extremes ignoring the other, babbling into phones or to themselves.”
Although the characters occasionally break out of the city to the Mojave Desert, it’s not long before they come crawling back to the hell they know—and Knight knows L.A. He worked as a staff writer for the L.A. Record, writing about the outsiders and outcasts who somehow slipped through L.A.’s dream factory long enough to make something meaningful. The novel opens with an epigraph from Tomata du Plenty of the Screamers, and the prologue is fittingly titled “We’re Desperate,” which is also the name of a song by L.A. punk legends X. These underground artists who made names for themselves during the first wave of L.A. punk were all born somewhere else, drawn to the city like hungry jackals to the carcass of the music industry.
It’s women who propel Knight’s story along: Tiffany sets everything in motion, and Cam chases her down, leaving a path of destruction in her wake. Tiffany’s mother, Mauve, sees through Cam—maybe because she’s an older version of her—and she steals every scene she’s in. While her husband is out searching for Tiffany, Mauve seduces her Yogi, a dim-witted ex-con named Stan, in case she needs a plan B to fall back on.
Everyone’s a grifter in Knight’s L.A., but his male characters aren’t very good at it. Richard didn’t build his company; it was handed down to him by his father, and he promptly ran it into the ground. Stan fails to see through Mauve’s duplicity and dopily falls for her. Cam is the eye in the center of the storm, but can she outrun the chaos she creates? Do we even want her to?
The Gorgon of Los Feliz is a whip-smart take on identity in a place where reinvention is a prerequisite for making it, but taking things too far can have deadly consequences.•
Jim Ruland is the author of the novels Forest of Fortune and Make It Stop and a veteran of the U.S. Navy. He lives in San Diego.
