Slow Down
by Lee Matthew Goldberg
ISBN: 978-0-9899323-7-0
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.
To read an interview with Lee Matthew Goldberg on Paul D. Brazill's
Brit Grit and International Noir: Click Here
To listen to a live podcast interview of Lee Matthew Goldberg conducted by Steven Nester as part of his Poets of the Tabloid Murder web-radio series on Public Radio Exchange: Click Here
Advance Praise for Slow Down:
"Goldberg successfully evokes empathy for characters who start out as self-absorbed, only to have their selfishness increase.
'You are such a pretentious loser,' one character announces to the protagonist, Noah, of Lee Matthew Goldberg’s debut novel. Slow Down is a brilliant rush of a work charting the rise and fall of Noah and other "pretentious losers" as they use and abuse people and substances to get ahead in the movie business, regardless of whom they hurt . . .
. . . The book makes masterful use of the story-within-a-story conceit, bookending Noah’s powerful first-person narrative with a prologue and an epilogue written in the third person. The prologue piques interest to keep pages turning rapidly, while the epilogue tantalizes with the notion that Noah’s story still remains unfinished. The pointed use of cameras and camera-related imagery in the narrative enhances the theme that all the characters crave being seen in multiple senses. The author’s creation of a drug called Fast, juxtaposed against the title of the central movie, Slow Down, wonderfully captures the twin contradictory impulses in everyone's lives. Savor this book, though, or miss apt turns of phrase such as, 'His hair was a brown ball of chaos.'" — ForeWord Reviews
"A frenetic first novel . . . full of unedifying characters scrambling for the elusive, perhaps imaginary, brass ring."—Publishers Weekly
"Dark and hard-boiled writing that grabs you by the throat. Slow Down is one of those rare novels that’s so good you want it to go on forever!"—Nick Pengelley, author of Ryder: An Ayesha Ryder Novel
"Lee Matthew Goldberg writes like a young Bret Easton Ellis doing a line of uncut Denis Johnson off the back of a public urinal. Memorable in the best possible way, also mostly illegal, Goldberg’s Slow Down is a mad man's tour of Manhattan’s vices, follies, and ultimate betrayals."—Urban Waite, author of Terror of Living and Sometimes the Wolf
"Slow Down starts fast and gets faster quick, gunning through yellow streetlights on its way to a full collision with your shattered soul. Lee Matthew Goldberg takes on the American Zeitgeist in this stunning debut."—Stephen Jay Schwartz, L.A. Times bestselling author of Boulevard and Beat
"Noah Spaeth is a 22-year-old New York City trust-fund millennial. He knows he's destined for wealth and, more important, fame as a novelist and filmmaker. Except he doesn't write and has never directed . . .The setup in the first couple of chapters is slow to develop, but once Noah hits that first party, the plot takes off. There’s no one to like [in Slow Down], but there’s no denying it's fun to watch rich snots destroy themselves."—Booklist
"Goldberg’s portrayal of the New York demi-monde is one of the book’s strengths and brings to mind Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero."— CrimeFictionLover.com
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