Savage Recreation, Savage Recreation

Ian Bloom wrote Savage Recreation at age 24 in summer residence at the Bowery Hotel, New York-financed by a phantom movie director. A surreal odyssey through appearances, realities, excess, and deception. Somewhere in between, Bloom was cast in the Warners Brothers film The Nice Guys, to smoke cigarettes opposite Ryan Gosling-who supposedly grew concerned Bloom might steal the scene. Ever the gentleman, Bloom graciously napped, letting the stuntman take the moment, courtesy of directorial permissions.His second novel, Savage Recreation, evokes the brutality of Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, laced with William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and slivers of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls. A hallucinatory plunge into corporate dystopia, pharmaceutical mind-control, and the mechanization of desire, Bloom wrote this while reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow-but only up to the casino.