“Hollywood Mad Dogs is a romantic and specific telling of a sportswriter's migration through 1970s Hollywood, an evocative record of that particular haze, and told in the worldview of one who lived it. It centers on a McMurtry/Danny Deck-esque hero who floats through the bacchanalia of filmmaking, refusing to become a cog in the giant, jaded machine. It feels as if Shrake might have actually experienced all these things, just for the purpose of reliving them again on the pages of this book. An important addition to the dependably fun ‘go West, young screenwriter’ canon.—Richard Linklater, Academy Award nominated director & screenwriter
“Edwin ‘Bud’ Shrake is one of the Lone Star State’s essential writers. With vibrant prose and mordant wit, he brings alive that world of myth and machismo where a writer had two jobs: Raise life-threatening amounts of hell and stay alive long enough to put it on paper.”—Sarah Bird, author of Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen
“Hollywood Mad Dogs is Day of the Locust meets Fear and Loathing, but way funnier. Nobody captures absurdity like Bud Shrake. He went down the Movie Magic rabbit hole with Movie Star Steve McQueen and missed nothing. It's dead solid perfect, all the peaches are stranger than ever, and Shrake never misses a step of the Hollywood shuffle.”—William Broyles, Jr., Academy Award nominated screenwriter of Apollo 13 and Cast Away
“What a delicious posthumous gift Edwin 'Bud' Shrake left us with his novel, Hollywood Mad Dogs. Like his earlier roman a clef, Strange Peaches, Hollywood Mad Dogs is dark, funny, insightful, and, ultimately, more than a little tragic. Part of the fun in reading it is figuring out which characters 'are' Steve McQueen, Fred Weintraub, Marvin Schwartz, and so on. But, again, like Strange Peaches, it is first and foremost a masterly example of great fiction writing. Drawing on his experiences as a screenwriter, Shrake managed to write one of the best novels ever written about Hollywood with Hollywood Mad Dogs. It captures Hollywood at a certain time in its history better than any novel before it.”—W.K. Stratton, author of The Making of the Wild Bunch
