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Mickey Wildland was once Hollywood's most promising director. His debut film Neon Saints made him a star. Then he made sure it never happened again.

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Years later, Mickey is broke, blacklisted, and running out of road. When the California wildfires force him out of his Malibu apartment and into the Pacific Ocean, a dying sailor named Clay Pierce pulls him back to the surface — and offers him something more dangerous than rescue: the truth about himself.

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What follows is Mickey's last chance. A producer willing to bet on him one final time. An unmade film that might be the only honest thing he has left. And a long reckoning with the question he has spent fifteen years drinking past — not whether he can succeed, but whether he believes he deserves to.

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Wildland is a novel about addiction, creative failure, and the specific terror of being seen. It is about men who run from the thing that made them, and what happens when they finally stop. Moving from the dive bars of Hollywood to the open Pacific to the ruins of a city on fire, it asks whether a man can let go of the story he's been telling about himself long enough to find out who he actually is.

 

Raw, darkly comic, and unexpectedly moving, Wildland announces S.C. Smith as a distinctive new voice in American literary fiction.