Hollywood Church: Short Stories and Poems

"After reading these powerful, though deeply-disturbing stories and poems, Southern California will never be the same for me. Wendy Rainey has redefined L.A. Noir and given the grotesque entwined with the lyrical it's own unique place in the California literary canon. I'm full of admiration for the author's gifts, and sense there's a lot more to come!" -Edward Field, American Poetry Icon. Author of After the Fall. Wendy Rainey's Los Angeles is dark and menacing, the gutted insides of a glittering facade. Her poems and stories are written from the POV of those who serve at the whim of others; waitresses, nannies, production guys, personal assistants, clerks, and explore their careless exploitation by the uber-class, those self-obsessed, complacent winners with their entitlements and prying eyes. These are stories of people on the edge. A beleaguered server imagines Denny's diners turning into orangutans and farm animals. A sixteen year old incest survivor gives living another try. An exhausted waitress turns the tables on a panhandler at the bus stop. A guy out for a boat ride with friends decides it is a good day to die. In these stores, expect the unexpected. Always. Rainey writes about the marginalized and disenfranchised without pity, without mercy. Her sharp dialogue, and delicious escapes into surrealistic fantasy soar far above the quotidian world her characters too often find themselves in. This is original, exciting storytelling about a Los Angeles too often unseen. -Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen, and State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly, 4 time Best of the Net, 3 time Pushcart nominee. Marilyn Monroe said Hollywood is the kind of place where they offer you $3000 for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul. She liked to say she always held out for the 50 cents. In Wendy Rainey's collection "Hollywood Church," earnest working-class people - nannies, former prostitutes, truckers and more -- struggle against a glittering glamorous lie to hold onto their souls and find (and maybe keep) a little tenderness. In this collection, we find The Sherwood Forest Inn, where a sign promises all fantasies fulfilled. But here there's no Robin Hood, no justice, and the slogan is "rob from the rich and give to the whore." Throughout this collection, Wendy Rainey shines a light on the fakery and cruelty that hide beneath the Hollywood promise. She shines a light on the underbelly of human nature in stories like "Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid," where a high-powered successful Hollywood executive can't bear her daughter's love. Her solution is to drug her loving, boisterous four-year-old to keep the kid from being a nuisance. In "Chapel on Wheels," a trucker-turned-Hollywood dreamer searches for God in a trailer on Van Ness. In other moments, a statuette of Big Boy becomes a reminder of infidelity and Hollywood Boulevard becomes the Arizona Desert. The Hollywood Wendy Rainey shows us is a grim one, far from the Technicolor dream. "You will see a vacancy there that we have mistaken for greatness," she writes. But that Vacancy sign flickers on and off, promising hope. The nanny stands up to the mother's cruelty. The trucker remembers beauty. And, in a lovely lyric poem, a swarm of Monarch butterflies descends on a freeway overpass. There is tension in this book, a struggle for beauty and hope against the odds. Wendy Rainey writes like a modern-day Jean Rhys. In "Hollywood Church," she shows us something true about ourselves and our world and helps us realize what our souls are truly worth. -Lori Jakiela, author of Belief is its Own Kind.