Screenwriter Bruce Wagner, writer for the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series and of the TV mini-series "White Palms," has set his second novel, like his first, Force Majeure, in the hip world with which he is intimate--Hollywood, as in Babylon writ large, a world of dreams shattered or grotesquely corrupted. Arranged in short sections, each written from the viewpoint of some 20 alternating characters, without a clear plot line, the book's style is as disorienting as the drug-dazed sexually abusive lifestyles of the players. Wagner pulls no punches in his descriptions of these pitiable losers and vile winners; indeed parts of the book are hard on the stomach. The book is unrelentingly powerful, and occasionally downright revolting.