By KEVIN HOOVER

To quote Stephen King, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” For the money, you won’t find an individual who does more of either than Adam Novak. While Novak moonlights as an author of the brilliantly bizarre, he keeps the bills paid by serving as the “Head of Story” for William Morris Endeavor (formerly the William Morris Agency). For the past thirty years, he’s been a part of most folk’s movie-watching experiences, having been the personal script reader for the likes of John Travolta and Bruce Willis. And when a little indie film named the Blair Witch Project needed all the advocacy it could muster, Novak was one of its most vocal supporters.

Novak’s newest book, Rat Park, reads as, “An L.A. power couple orders an A.I. sex robot to escape their marital prison. When androids keep showing up uninvited to their house in the Hollywood Hills, they save the world from a violent robopocalypse and rescue their marriage.” The author has been keeping busy with public appearances and readings in support of the novel, and so well received it’s been that the tale is now being reproduced in audiobook format by the team at Encyclopocalypse Publications. The author took some time out of his busy schedule to discuss his latest work

The book’s name, Rat Park, is without a doubt inspired by the drug addiction studies conducted in the ‘70s. Discuss any correlation between the real-world inspiration and how the concept of dependence permeates throughout your story.

Rat Park explores our dependence on attachment in our lives. Without attachment, addiction creeps in through all of its insidious forms. The psychology experiment in the 1970s placed a dozen rats in cages with available drinking water and water spiked with black tar heroin. Every rat in solitary confinement OD’d. The other lab rats were placed in a park where they found food, females, fun things to do, and never touched the water spiked with smack. Lose the cage. Find your park. That’s the takeaway of this novel.  

The notion of androids becoming a part of everyday life seemingly becomes more plausible with each passing day. To a degree, it’s already happening in select aspects. Was exploring the idea something that you believed would just make an interesting narrative hook for a novel, or do you feel that your story is an exposition of a future that’s only mere years away from being fully realized?

Jerry Stahl, who wrote Permanent Midnight, said this about Rat Park: “It’s like Bret Easton Ellis and Phillip K. Dick had a baby, and the baby wrote a book.”

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The insatiable droids in Rat Park probably have wet dreams.

Compare this most recent book to some of your other works. 

All of my novels are part of a dark, connected, Marvel-type universe. You can read the novels in any order and they will end up forming an extreme love letter to Los Angeles. My first, The Non–Pro, explored alcoholism/striving in Hollywood. Take Fountain was a “found pages” novel about reading scripts for the William Morris Agency coupled with seething contempt for the indignities of screenwriting. Freaks of the Industry was a personal examination about my traumatic birth where I cheated death but suffered a 50% hearing loss in both ears. My twin brother and I were teenagers when we learned from our folks that we were actually triplets but sadly, our sister did not make it. Freaks of the Industry imagines a femme fatale scenario where the sister survives, gets raised by an insane nurse, and seduces her wombmates to exact revenge. Rat Park, my latest novel, is a funhouse mirror of compulsive sexual addiction that turns out to be a love story for the ages.

For a guy whose day gig it is to read scripts and develop stories, is it difficult to formulate ideas for novels and still find them interesting enough to flesh out for an entire book?

I am doubly blessed reading mostly great material at the greatest agency in the world for the last thirty years, the best perch there is in the industry, and very fortunate to have had four novels published about the death sport called the movie business. My gift is not my own writing but my ability to recognize greatness in other people’s scripts. I’m in the discovery business, so for me, it’s fantastic to be discovered by Encyclopocalypse Publications, which made a deal with my Cleveland publisher Red Giant Books to produce the audiobook of Rat Park, read by the author, coming soon on Audible.

It’s been said that when writers write, they know exactly who they are writing for. Who is the ideal reader for Rat Park, and for all who dare journey between its pages, what do you want the book’s lasting legacy to be?

Lately, I’ve been thinking I’ll be read when I’m dead. Rat Park is the trace I’m leaving behind. Who was the ideal reader for John O’Brien when he wrote Leaving Las Vegas? I suspect the answer is O’Brien himself. My inspiration will always be John O’Brien, who didn’t write his obituary but a doomed love story, the best kind, with his first novel, which was my north star when I was writing Rat Park. I hope total strangers discover this novel and decide to order banned public library copies of Non-Pro, Freaks, and Take Fountain on Amazon. And I sincerely hope Encyclopocalypse makes a fortune on their Rat Park audiobook.

To purchase a physical copy of Rat Park or to stay informed of the upcoming audiobook release, visit here.