Nolan Knight

The Neon Lights Are Veins is a rather intense ride through the lower end of Hollywood. Beneath the glow of the neon lights is a world of drug users, skaters, runaways, and trannies. Living day to day in rundown hotels that are just shells of their former glamour, Alvi and his friends are living the Life. And that life includes not just underground clubs, but walking the stroll along the boulevard and catering to whatever fetishists can flash some bucks.

The story is told in dense street vernacular and starry prose, sort of a merge of seventies glam Bowie with Jim Morrison's poetry-inspired musings and some Mohawk-styled punkishness. There's a whole lot packed in here that's really brought to life by this prose. Diving into this one is sort of like opening up Burgess' Clockwork Orange in that it takes a few pages to get lost in the tone and pace of the narration and all the street phrases.

There are two parallel stories here of tough guys with some measure of innocence still in them. Those stories, of course, connect at some point.

All in all, it's an excellent book, gritty, street-wise, and never hitting a dull moment. Probably worth reading more than once to capture things you missed the first time through.… (más)