From the acclaimed Hollywood writer/director and author of The Player and The Return of the Player, Michael Tolkin, comes a darkly comic thriller set in a near future Hollywood that has been devastated by a memory-destroying virus from North Korea.

With The Player and The Return of the Player, Tolkin established himself as the master novelist of modern Hollywood, praised as “a scorched-earth social satirist” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times) whose writing is “entertainingly dark” (The New York Times Book Review) and “sharply observed” (People). In his newest novel, NK3, the HOLLYWOOD sign might be missing a few letters, but Los Angeles is just as drunk on power and glamour as ever, even after a North Korean-engineered microbe accidentally spreads across the world, destroying memory and erasing human identity.

In the wake of the virus, called NK3, dependence on computers has left society helpless because no one can remember their passwords. Even personal names have been forgotten, replaced by monikers that hint at the past: “AutoZone,” “Frank Sinatra,” “Go Bruins.” Within the sixty-foot-high fence that surrounds the Hollywood hills a new aristocracy rules—the Verified, whose power is memory itself. The Verified keep control over the Drifters, Shamblers, and Bottle Bangers with a history invented by the Mythology Committee. But when a few members of the Verified keep a change in their reality secret even from the rest of their privileged cohort, and a pop superstar from the pre-NK3 world is pulled from the shambling masses, the power balance threatens to shift. Meanwhile, a Drifter named Hopper is compelled by his Silent Voice—a mysterious fragment of memory some survivors carry on from the state-imposed Rehab program—to look for a wife whose name and face he doesn’t know. To find her, he’ll have to fight his way through a melee of tyrants, prophets, and rebels as they struggle for power and survival in a town that still manages to exert a magnetic force, even as a ruined husk.

A darkly comic thriller reminiscent of Robert Olen Butler’s Hell, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles, and Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach series, NK3 is a smart, compulsive read.

 

Michael Tolkin is an award-winning writer, director, and producer. His novels include The Player, The Return of the Player, Among the Dead, and Under Radar. For the film adaptation of The Player, Tolkin won the Writers Guild Award, the British Academy Award, the PEN Center USA West Literary Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best crime screenplay, and was nominated for an Academy Award. Most recently, he has been a consulting producer and writer for the Showtime series Ray Donovan.

 

Praise for Michael Tolkin:

“Michael Tolkin is an L.A. Antonioni with a sense of humor.”—New Yorker

“Tolkin remains impressive as a scorched-earth social satirist.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times, on The Return of the Player

“Michael Tolkin asks tough questions about basic human themes—like faith, redemption, remorse, hope, revenge and death. He’s unafraid to suggest provocative answers, or to speculate that there may be no answers at all . . .Under Radar continues the thorny moral themes and brainy, suspenseful, barbed tone of his previous work . . . Packs the power of some ancient parable.”—Adam Woog, Seattle Times, on Under Radar

“One of the most wounding and satirical of all Hollywood expos廥: dark and mordant . . . savage . . . A portrait of life among the high-rollers and deal makers of a major Hollywood studio in the post-Golden Age. Unnerving . . . A nightmare rendered with icy precision.”—Los Angeles Times, on The Player