Savage Recreation - Hardcover

by Ian Bloom (Author)

Ian Bloom wrote Savage Recreation at age 24 in summer residence at the Bowery Hotel, New York - financed by a phantom movie director, fueled by cigarettes, suits, and the city's slow rot. A surreal odyssey through appearances, realities, excess, and deception - New York as pressure chamber, names as currency, access as a con, and the truth handled quietly.

Somewhere in between, Bloom was cast in the Warner Bros. film The Nice Guys with no agent - just signal - to smoke cigarettes opposite Ryan Gosling. Then came the story: Bloom showed up moving like a movie star and the room went quiet. The machine recalibrated. The scene tried to drift. Bloom kept it rehearsed. Professional. Exact. Then he did the most dangerous thing in Hollywood: he walked away from a frame he didn't want. A nap in the green room. A handshake. Gone. That's how you stay clean. That's how you stay inevitable.

His second novel, Savage Recreation, is a corporate fever dream - Notes from the Underground in a tailored jacket, Naked Lunch rewritten as a board memo. A hallucinatory plunge into surveillance capital, pharmaceutical mind-control, and sex as operating system. Revolutions become brands. Desire becomes protocol. The city becomes a lab. Bloom wrote it while reading Gravity's Rainbow - but only up to the casino: enough to learn the architecture, not enough to get lost inside it.