Wednesday, 25 March 2015
Slow Down by Lee Matthew Goldberg
Release Date: 20th January 2015
Publisher: New Pulp Press
Genres: Thriller
Indiebound buy link: http://www.leematthewgoldberg.com/wp-content/themes/goldberg/images/buy-at-indiebound.jpg
Brook Cottage Books is thrilled to welcome Lee Matthew Goldberg to the blog with this fantastic guest post as he talks about his writing journey.
The journey from inception to
publication was a long one for Slow Down. I was working at my first job
in TV production after college and the whole office was fired. I decided to
start writing Slow Down, finished a draft, and then put it in a desk for
10 years before picking it up again and seeing it was worth revisiting.
The first spark of an idea that I
had was from the Coldplay song, “Yellow.” The lyrics “they were all
yellow,” stuck in my mind and I had this image of a circular yellow tattoo
being seen on people throughout New York. In the book, all of Dominick’s
actresses in his film wind up having a similar tattoo as a mark.
In terms of setting, I grew up in
Manhattan and knew the book would take place there. New York has this
dog-eat-dog quality that fits with the characters’ aspirations of stepping on
one another to get ahead. I’ve always been a big fan of Bret Easton Ellis and
Jay McInerney and there are elements of Slow Down that were
influenced by American Psycho and Bright Lights, Big City, both seminal books
about the darker underbelly of wealthy Manhattanites.
The femme fatale character
Isadora was influenced by my love of classic noir films like Double Indemnity and great noir
writers like James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. The main character Noah
becomes the sap she cons into getting rid of her husband, even though Noah
thinks he’s the one conning her all along.
With the novel's themes, I wanted
to play with the idea of film as life. Noah speaks of wanting
to “live a life interesting enough for people to watch,” and Dominick
wants to create a film where the actors actually experience and feel what their
characters are feeling. The notion of seeing the world through a lens permeates
throughout Slow Down, since everyone is hiding part of themselves and
only certain aspects are highlighted. It’s as if they all know how terrible
they are behaving to get what they desire and are afraid of revealing too
much.
Lastly, the book can be read in two
different ways. It can be a noir tale about the desire for success getting
out of or hand, or a twisted love story about Noah and his childhood crush
Nevie, both embroiled in a rush for fame, heading for a crash unless they leave
everything behind and just “slow down”. I like books without definitive endings
where the characters can go off in many directions. I’ll leave it up to the
readers to decide where mine eventually wind up.
Book Blurb
How far would you go to make your dreams come true? For budding writer and filmmaker Noah Spaeth, being a Production Assistant in director Dominick Bambach's new avant-garde film isn't enough. Neither is watching Dominick have an affair with the lead actress, the gorgeous but troubled Nevie Wyeth. For Noah's dream is to get both the film and Nevie in the end, whatever the cost. And this obsession may soon become a reality once Dominick's spurned wife Isadora reveals her femme fatale nature with a seductive plot to get rid of her husband for good.
Slow Down, a cross between the noir styling of James M. Cain and the dark satire of Bret Easton Ellis, is a thrilling page-turner that holds a mirror up to a media-saturated society that is constantly searching for the fastest way to get ahead, regardless of consequences.
AUTHOR BIO
Lee Matthew Goldberg graduated with an MFA from the New School. He is a regular contributor to The Montreal Review and The Adirondack Review. His fiction has also appeared in Essays & Fictions, The New Plains Review, Orion headless, Verdad Magazine, BlazeVOX, and on Amazon. He has co-founded a monthly reading series called The Guerrilla Lit Fiction Series (guerrillalit.wordpress.com). His debut novel SLOW DOWN is a neo-noir thriller that will be published by New Pulp Press in January 2015. Follow him at leematthewgoldberg.com and @leematthewg.
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