Book excerpt: When the most successful film studio in Hollywood is racked with failed projects, financial reversals and bizarre accidents, rumors swirl that legendary long-time studio head Nero is on the chopping block. The notorious and increasingly erratic Nero engineers a pre-emptive strike against the studio’s parent company by staging a star-studded film shoot in the desert and then orchestrating a series of increasingly traumatic accidents—prematurely triggered pyrotechnic effects, blanks switched out for live ammo, and worse—guaranteed to make the project fail so lethally that it brings down the very studio that he created. The cast and crew settle into their temporary desert home blissfully unaware that the entire location sits on top of a radioactive waste dump. As the film’s magnetic lead actor Tony Billings scrounges for drugs and cheap thrills, he is stalked by an obsessive entertainment journalist, Frederick M Barclay, who pursues his ultimate objective to once and for all lay open his subject in the most gruesome possible way.