IN the hands of actors, writers, directors and producers, Hollywood is a dream factory, a place that cranks out wish fulfillment scenarios like assembly lines manufacture automobiles. In novelist Steve Erickson’s hands, Hollywood is a fever dream, a waking nightmare that elucidates the truth of the self that only movies can attempt to uncover. ZEROVILLE — the latest novel by CalArts professor, Los Angeles Magazine contributor and literary cult figure Erickson — delves into the mystery and allure of celluloid, where a master shot gives the audience its bearing, but the close-up scrambles all perspective and engulfs the collective psyche in freeze-frame moments spanning whole lifetimes.

IN the Beginning, there was “Superman: The Movie,” and it was truly divine. Then came “Superman III” and “IV” and an icon became a joke, the comic-book superhero a mere soulless commodity. Flash forward thirty-one years from the day we believed a man can fly- back when taglines actually meant something- and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” opens to big box office, but little critical or fan-boy acclaim. Is it too much to ask for something akin to perfection in our filmic adaptations of the illustrated gods of geek? What happened between the emergence of Krypton’s son on the silver screen and the adamantium-clawed mutant leaked to the omnipresent internet? Herewith, I offer a look at the celluloid landscape of the good guys, the bad guys, and those freaky in-betweeners who serve as metaphors for every misfit or outsider who insist on searching for life’s deepest truths in a goddamn comic book.

The old adage of the newspaper trade – when there was such a thing, before the advent of USA Today, the Internet, and short attention spans – has been that “Dog Bites Man” is hardly news, but “Man Bites Dog” is a headline home run. But what if a dog bites a mountain lion, and the man does nothing, except watch both animals bleed all over one another, while they battle over his human destiny? Is that news, worthy of a front-page story? If you’re the L.A. Times, it’s worthy of the front-page section, replete of photos and filling all of five paragraphs in the “California Briefing” section nine pages deep.

PHILLIP ROTH’S 29th book (and the 15th of his I’ve read) is the best of the last few, similarly short, novels he’s produced. I thought EVERYMAN was a total waste of time, and saw EXIT GHOST as an interesting but not wholly successful follow-up to THE GHOST WRITER, but his newest really worked for me. The first-person narrator, Marcus Messner, possesses a voice that is equal parts brilliant, precocious, antagonistic [...]