Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Sulfa Blatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, John Kay, the author most recently of the Dead

Circus, published by Atlantic Monthly Press, recently out in paperback,

the author as well of a previous novel, Stars Screaming,

also available in paper from the same publisher.

Now, the books have almost by necessity a certain similarity to thrillers, because they're set in Los Angeles, a place in

which it seems almost impossible to narrate events without the presence of at least

some kind of usually retired policemen or private eye. But here you get the feeling that this is

a convention being used in order to expose certain truths about the city. Can we begin there?

Let's talk about Los Angeles?

Well, you know, I grew up here, and I grew up in Los Angeles.

And I think when you grow up in L.A. as far as other than coming from a different city to live here, There's a different way you look at Los Angeles.

And part of what drove me to write these books was that I wanted to explore the dream scape

that's here, that sort of, the way to describe it is that my father used to have a store

on Hollywood and Vine, and I would take the bus down there to meet him, and I would look

up in the mountains, and I would see like these beautiful houses, and then I would look in the

street, and I would see these people that were like derelicts, and it was just kind of

...