The three D’s: dark, despondent, demoralized. A washed-out ’70s Hollywood, wired on booze, surveillance, and bad intentions. As seen through the lurid lens of a camera that can’t look away, spooling through dive bars, cheap motels, and flickering TV screens. Where delivery men stalk starlets, fame curdles into paranoia, and every encounter feels slightly off, unsettled. A spiraling hypnotic hallucination of Los Angeles, caught between glam and rot.
And so it goes in Newsreels, the first—but until now, never published—novel written by the late Hob Broun.
Presaging the media-saturated fever dream of 1985’s Inner Tube and the genre pastiches in his posthumous 1988 story collection, Cardinal Numbers, Newsreels offers a nightmarish portrait of the wounded, lonely souls who continue to cling to the fringes of the Tinseltown dream machine—despite being its collateral damage—and the opportunistic predators who prey on them. This is Hob Broun at his earliest and most acidic. Yet even at his grimmest, Broun’s scathing humor and the precision and wit of his prose betray a wry hope: that even the lost, the washed up, the aged out, the rejected, may find a way to persevere in an American fantasyland run amok.
"I’ve been a Brounhead for forty years, but this early gem, hidden until now, is a revelation. Louche, grim, hilarious, Newsreels is prescient and dead-eyed in its depiction of Hollywood bottom-feeder despair and parasocial menace. The main characters, Clem Los Alamos and Beverly Farms, stick with you in the most enjoyably disturbing ways, as does Hob Broun’s way around a hard-boiled, image-rich sentence. Put this on the shelf with Didion, Babitz, West and Bruce Wagner."—Sam Lipsyte
"Hob Broun in Newsreels has crafted an LA that feels so vivid, even in its greasy uneasiness, so like “living tissue” in the words of Barry Hannah, that the cast of characters—including Clem Los Alamos, Beverly Farms, Hi, Rolo, and Lois, among many others—sex each other up, wear each other raw, and people the world in such a way that you can’t help but peek, but gaze, but follow along. Like watching oddballs in Portis or PTA, you just want to hang around and gawk at some weirdos, so you feel a little bit better about your own private dance moves."—Gene Kwak
"I have been in touch with writers for almost 30 years, and in the course of that time, none has shown me the courage exhibited by Hob Broun, whose example and bravery shall not perish."—Gordon Lish
"Broun is one of those writers who, when you first discover him, you can’t believe isn’t a literary celebrity, a goddamn legend."—Tin House
"While writing Inner Tube, Broun underwent emergency surgery to remove a spinal tumour. He was left paralysed from the neck down. Remarkably, he finished the novel—and wrote the stories in Cardinal Numbers—using a kind of writing-machine: an oral catheter (or ‘sip-and-puff device’) connected to a customised word processor, triggered by his breath whenever a letter flashed on the screen. This aspect of Broun’s life lends itself to mythologization: what better image of writerly dedication? At the same time, it risks obscuring what really matters: the work itself."—David Winters, Biblioklept
4-part taped interview with Hob Broun (1985)
