Brand New Cherry Flavor: A Novel of the Occult

"She wanted to seduce and subvert, jab a needle so irresistibly that they didn't even realize their illusions were being pricked, inflatable dolls collapsing into sad rubber husks." Lisa Nova, a sensual Nastassja Kinski lookalike, once played a naked victim in a splatter movie, but at 26 she's a hungry iconoclastic filmmaker who gets screwed out of an important directing job. She turns to a witch doctor for revenge, and soon bizarre tattoos appear on her body. The magic she impulsively invokes turns out to be more than a specific spell against her nemesis: it's a cascading rearrangement in the forces active around Lisa herself. Todd Grimson's achievement in this unpredictable horror novel is that Lisa's world is not just California flashy, but is believably complex, with all the entanglements of a rich life.