In his first novel, The Bus, author Steve Abee is on a bus. He observes from the windows of the practically defunct MTA Line 26 life as it goes by—as he goes by it—starting near downtown along 7th Street, up Virgil until it becomes Hillhurst, then west on Franklin and eventually to other points.

In Johnny Future, Abee has returned to the point of arrival, not far from where Vermont Ave. crosses Hollywood Blvd., west of where the latter ends at the collision-inducing intersection that marks the end—or beginning—of Virgil—or Hillhurst—in the area at which the three points of East Hollywood, Silver Lake and Franklin Hills meet in the easement of what hipsters imagine is Los Feliz. Like the preceding sentence, the intersection is confusing the first few times. But Johnny Future is not confused, and Johnny Future, while a significant sleeper, is not confusing.

Like Slackers but with a backbone of a protagonist who never peels away to allow the next “protagonist” to take the figurative baton to the subsequent one, Johnny Future seems to have little talent beyond surreptitiously naming the many former and current landmarks of the area (Onyx Café, Yucca’s, Barnsdall, et al.) while seeking to score a few rails of meth, some chicken to munch, a plastic Western Exterminator statue to punch... But a plot suddenly plunges Future into action and there’s no stopping, no going back, no slowing of page-turning until the explosive end. From downtown, to El Segundo, to the harrowing showdown between the LAPD and Future as he carries his dying grandmother—who he valiantly and violently rescued from an old folks’ home in the Valley—back to her lover and Future’s friend, the chase is non-stop once it starts.

Abee is one of the better local writers who has long been a part of Los Angeles and who knows the area better than some may want to intimately know even as they pretend to live in edgy areas.

This book is a road map to how things used to be in the emergent hipster areas, and may be pointing the way back to how it might be again.


Rare Bird Lit www.RareBirdLit.com