Occult Los Angeles (And This Is Just The Beginning)

I wanted to direct your attention to this piece I wrote last summer for The Towner, The Architecture of Belief, about (of course) Los Angeles (of course) and the occult (of course):


Here is a story about Los Angeles: In 1935, a man who attempted to murder his wife gifted over 4,000 acres of land – previously owned by a man who had survived two attempts on his own life by separate, jilted lovers – to a corrupt mayor later driven from office by the efforts of a charitable Christian businessman with a side business in sexual novelties, who discovered that mayor’s secrets behind a false wall in a fake library. That businessman founded a thriving chain of restaurants built on the premise of giving away free food, one of which became the meeting place for a science fiction writer’s club, whose members included a man who conned a rocket scientist out of his life savings after first taking notes on how the scientist masturbated, and another man who convinced the city of Los Angeles to erect a three-story-tall fake Babylonian arch in the middle of Hollywood and then turn it into a shopping mall. This really happened, and I mention it here to remind you of the old saw about truth’s superlative relationship to fiction.


I've just started work on a book about the occult in the San Fernando Valley and I couldn't be happier. Have a story about goths in Burbank, psychics in the North Hollywood, or healers in Pacoima? Let me know!