Griffin Mill is ruthlessly ambitious, driven to control the levers of America's dream-making machinery. Griffin listens to writers pitch him stories all day, sitting in judgment on their fantasies, their lives. But now one writer to whose pitch he responded so glibly is sending him postcards: "You said you'd get back to me. You didn't. And now in the name of all writers who get pushed around by studio executives I'm going to kill you."

Squeezed between the threat to his life and the threat to his job, Griffin's deliberate and horrifying response spins him into a nightmare. Then he meets the sad and beautiful June Mercator and his obsession for her threatens to destroy them both.

With a compulsively readable narrative that offers a devastating portrait of contemporary Hollywood--the studio execs, the deal-making, the politics, the pitches--The Player is the smartest book about Hollywood since What Makes Sammy Run? and the most sinister since The Day of the Locust. If Dashiel Hammett were alive today, this is the book he would write about Hollywood.

"A shrewd, entertainingly dark Hollywood novel."--The New York Times Book Review

"One of the most wounding and satirical of all Hollywood exposes: 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

"[A] surely crafted novel...that defines the machinery of moviedom in incisive, vivid strokes...a winning black comedy. Tolkin writes keenly, with a cynical eye for the machinations of the entertainment biz.... A hilarious indictment of contemporary Hollywood's ruling mentality. In its wry, acerbic description of the world behind the studio gates Tolkin's book recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald...and the vengeful comedy of Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Bizarre and brilliant.... A grand guide through the private offices, board rooms, and restaurants where Hollywood deals--and throats-are cut. Not since Indecent Exposure have we met such a consummately skilled player at this power game."--Boston Herald

"A tour de force that draws directly on Tolkin's experiences as a television writer and screenwriter who knows Hollywood from its seamy inside out."--Vogue

"Deliriously amoral. Just like Hollywood; full of asides and in-jokes and wisecracks."--Washington Post Book World

"[A] memorably vivid Hollywood novel."--Rolling Stone

"Reminiscent of The Last Tycoon...suspense keeps you flipping the pages. The Player is thoroughly convincing, both as a portrait of a power broker and as a depiction of the stratagems within the coterie that runs Tinseltown."--Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"An unusually classy mystery."--Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Reverberates with the ghosts of Cain and Camus."--Women's Wear Daily

"Gets inside Hollywood today.... What makes The Player such a standout work is that it examines the mid-set of the film industry and all its posturing behind the cameras.... It reveals a continuum of viciousness that seems indigenous to Hollywood."--San Diego Union

"It's a thoroughly up-to-date fable that maybe Kafka would have written if he'd been employed by MGM. The book has a sinister inevitability about it and it's probably as detailed an account of the contemporary Hollywood psyche as we're likely to find in current fiction. Anyone who has some connection to the film industry should get a big, knowing kick from the book and never be able to look at a studio executive in quite the same light again. Michael Tolkin just about convinces us that the devil is alive and well and hanging out at Morton's."--Bret Easton Ellis

"Icy irony and extreme accuracy