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EARTHQUAKE WEATHER
by Terrill Lee Lankford
Ballantine, March 2004
304 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0345467779


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

EARTHQUAKE WEATHER opens with Mark Hayes waking up in the middle of an earthquake in Los Angeles. In the usual camaraderie associated with surviving a semi-disaster, Mark meets his neighbors and becomes involved in some of their lives.

Mark works as a d-boy (developer) for producer Dexter Morton. Morton is hell to work for, which is par for the course in the producing business. Mark was on the fringes of a shady scheme in a previous job, so Morton can get away with leaning a little harder than Mark might otherwise tolerate.

As a result of the earthquake, one of Morton's pictures is cancelled. This is actually a good thing, because Morton is getting paid whether the picture is made or not, and the picture was already way over budget and showing no signs of being a big money-maker.

To celebrate, Morton throws a party and invites 150 or so of his closest friends (read: people whose faces he wants to rub into his success). At this party, Morton's girlfriend of the moment, Charity James, finds him boffing someone else in her bed, and takes umbrage. Morton throws her out, and she winds up spending the night at Mark's house, but is gone when Mark wakes up. He goes up to Morton's house, to see if Charity has gone back there, and finds Morton face-down in the pool, dead.

Mark is not the most honest person you'll ever meet; if Lankford is writing with any honesty about how the movie production business works, Mark is actually not a bad guy. Which doesn't say a lot for the movie business. EARTHQUAKE WEATHER has a lot of interesting characters in it, but few (if any) are people I personally would like to know very well. It's a depressing crowd. Not because the characters are depressed, but the situations are not uplifting and cheerful.

One of the major sub-plots involves Charity James, who winds up living (sort of) with Mark's roommate, Jeff, until Jeff decides to move out, partly because of the earthquake and partly because of Charity. Charity is a cocaine whore, which leads to some interesting moments for Mark.

Mark has a chivalrous side to him, which is at odds with the part of him aching to succeed in Hollywood. Sometimes the knight wins, sometimes he doesn't. What happens to Charity doesn't wholly depend on Mark, but enough rides on him for Mark to behave in ways which cause him a lot of conflict, both internally and externally.

On the up side, Lankford writes very well. There were lines that made me laugh out loud, lines I've quoted to other people since reading them. While I didn't particularly enjoy what Lankford writes about, I truly did revel in how he wrote about it. If he ever writes a comedy, and it is as well written as EARTHQUAKE WEATHER , my sides would be hurting from laughing so much.

If you like Robert Campbell's La-La Land books, then EARTHQUAKE WEATHER may be something you'll really enjoy. Lankford writes with an air of authority about the movie business. His characters are real, although seldom likeable. The plot is good. I won't hurry to read more of Lankford, but not because he's a bad writer. I don't particularly like the tone, the miasma of the world he writes about. I do like the way he writes about it.

Reviewed by P. J. Coldren, March 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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