Walking to Hollywood is a dazzling triptych
- obsessive satirical elegiac
- in which Will Self burrows down through the intersections of time place & psyche to explore some of our deepest fears & anxieties with characteristic fearlessness & jagged humour. ' Very Little' is ostensibly the account of a curative journey to Canada & the USA but in fact the record of a nematode's progress as the worm of obsession
- with scale & packing & the 'stuff' of our lives
- bores through a mind in extremesis. ' Walking to Hollywood' is an extreme satire on celebrity in which the narrator believes that everyone he meets is played by a famous actor & that only he can solve the mystery of who murdered the movies. ' Spurn Head' leads Self to a tormented sojourn with a madman whose house is sliding over the edge of a cliff to a game of checkers with Death & finally to an encounter with one of Swift's immortal Struldbruggs & a march through a tear in time itself. In Walking to Hollywood Will Self pushes memoir to the limits of invention.