The Starlight Line

“Matt Marshall’s novel, The Starlight Line, is a fascinating, complex, layer-cake of a book. The frame narration is semi-autobiographical; the narrator is a frustrated writer from Cleveland, searching for inspiration. The other layers interpenetrate and enrich the frame story: Jack London’s drug-addled wanderings; Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico; a writer’s search for Jack Kerouac’s mysterious muse, Esperanza Villanueva. Marshall’s skillful technique allows him to experiment with a variety of narrative voices that work like various instruments in a symphony. The voices add texture and depth to the story. In effect, Marshall produces a novel that is about the process of fiction writing itself.” – Philip J. Skerry, author of Dark Energy: Hitchcock’s Absolute Camera and the Physics of Cinematic Spacetime and Psycho in the Shower: The History of Cinema’s Most Famous Scene

“With echoes of Kerouac, Lowry, and Bukowski, Matt Marshall delivers a penetrating, but oddly reassuring, look into the souls of the drifters, drinkers and all the rest of us who just don’t fit in.” – Larry Kirwan, author of A History of Irish Music, Rockin’ the Bronx and Liverpool Fantasy, and former leader of Irish-American rock band Black 47