By the end of the First Reel, it was apparent that Hollywood North is a book a baby boomer would really get. The novel is chock-full of pop culture tidbits that reference a fading moment: Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, Ripley’s Believe It
or Not!, Little Rascals, Gene Autry, House of Wax. A perfect snapshot of boyhood in the ’60s emerges, a small-town Ontario experience steeped in whiteness.

Admittedly, I struggled with the first pages. In them, we are introduced to our protagonist, Gus, without much physical description. What follows, in contrast, are female characters described with incel undertones: either as objects of the narrator’s affection (as the present-day narrator micro-fantasizes about a female passenger next to him on the train or as in-the-past Gus “takes in” his “honey-haired” seven-year- old classmate Annie), or, at the other extreme, as undead “mantis-like” hags (like the Sewing Machine Witch from the laundromat). The only female character exempt from any description is Gus’s mother (who, eventually, is deemed either pretty or lovely by a half-dozen male characters on separate occasions).

Normally, this would make me put a book down forever. But I pressed on, purposefully reading beyond my bias. Turns out the narrator doesn’t like anybody at all, himself included. Gus’s outlook borders on misanthropic, to the extent that he can barely acknowledge his best friend as anything other than an “annoying prick.” Gus quite simply views the world through the darkest, foggiest lens. And why shouldn’t he? This is fantasy-noir after all, and young Gus is learning the hard way that the world is hardly fair, and that Trenton, Ontario is full of jerks and creeps.

The book is broken into six “reels,” each of which are paced like unedited footage, slowly revealing a collection of tableaux that together illustrate the unfortunate lives of Gus and friends. There isn’t much that’s transcendent about the characters. They are about as cold and noir as the town they live in, aptly described in the book as a “borough abustle with simpletons and sycophants.”

There is a playful nature to the darkness, as the text is interspersed with TV Guide–style blurbs that recap a moment and silent movie intertitle cards that offer more cryptic commentary. These intertitles later play into a key narrative point, but there’s a bit of fussiness in these flourishes that makes the nod to filmmaking overwrought.

Libling is a commanding and economical writer. Hollywood North is fun to digest, with many clever chuckles, a great sense of wit, and excellent hard-boiled dialogue. Yet the overarching glass-half-empty mood makes for quite the opposite of a feel-good read. A feel-bad read: one where (spoiler alert) everyone dies, where fate can be prescribed by human intervention, and when coming out on top can still leave a person at the bottom. mRb