In a rundown Los Angeles apartment building - the titular Starlite Terrace - Patrick Roth unfurls the tragic linked stories of Rex, Moss, Gary, and June, four neighbors in a sort of burlesque of the Hollywood modern. In each of their singular collisions with fame, Roth's dark prose presages a universal and mythical fate of desperation. In The Man at Noah's Window, Rex shares the story of his father, a supposed hand double for Gary Cooper in High Noon. In Eclipse of the Sun, Moss, who lives in fear of the next holocaust, awaits a visit from the long-lost daughter he has tracked down. In Rider on the Storm, Gary, a rock drummer and born-again Christian, who almost played on the Turtles' 1960s hit Happy Together, strives to find escape from his personal guilt. And in The Woman in the Sea of Stars, June, a former Hollywood studio secretary whose husband once cheated on her with Marilyn Monroe, makes the best of a disconnected life until she emerges reborn through ashes strewn in the illuminated swimming pool of the Starlite Terrace. In each of these four tales of wannabes and almost-weres, Roth's L.A. portraits unfold in rare style, and, in Krishna Winston's masterful translation, the hopeless, loveless perversion of an Edward Ruscha - inspired California becomes a compelling pageant of all-American grotesques that is not to be missed.