From the acclaimed author of Where Did You Sleep Last Night, an acidly funny, raw, and devastating love story of a decrepit, fallen film star and the young feminist filmmaker who revives his career.

Set in disparate parts of Los Angeles, Chicken uproariously, grievously, relates the collision and inevitably ruinous paths of two incendiary figures. One is the once beautiful and very famous Parnell Wilde, a maverick actor arrogant in his disastrous fall. The other is Annabel Wrath, a much younger, idiosyncratic cult filmmaker with contradictory motives for seeking the older man out.

The two are profoundly altered by their meeting and its harrowing denouement and manage to save each other from their paths of torment and dizzying spirals of decline. But when Parnell is offered the chance to perform in the sequel to Ultraviolence, the feature film that made him famous — and to work again with its brilliant but merciless director — he and Annabel are forced to wrestle with their fractured pasts as the extreme, fleeting, and dangerous world of fame threatens to divide them.

Richard Clarkin