Falling Angel

(Paperback)

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Edgar Award Finalist: The hunt for a vanished singer leads a detective into the depths of the occult in this terrific novel (Stephen King).
Cyphre had a contract with the singer, stipulating payment upon Johnnys deathpayment that will be denied as long as Johnny clings to life. When Cyphre hires private investigator Harry Angel to find Johnny at the hospital, Angel learns that the singer has disappeared. It is no ordinary missing-persons case. Everyone he questions dies soon after, as Angels investigation ensnares him in a bizarre tangle of black magic, carnival freaks, and grisly voodoo. When the sinister Louis Cyphre begins appearing in Angels dreams, the detective fears for his life, his sanity, and his soul.

Falling Angel was the basis for the Alan Parker film Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, and Lisa Bonet.

Reviews

Terrific . . . One of a kind . . . Ive never read anything remotely like it. Stephen KingA chilling homage to the hard-boiled detective novel of the Raymond Chandler school. The New York TimesA near perfect book . . . Not since Psycho changed the bathing habits of thousands has a novelist so completely turned conceptions inside out. Los Angeles Times

Author Bio

William Hjortsberg (19412017) was an acclaimed author of novels and screenplays. Born in New York City, Hjortsbergs first success came with Alp (1969), an offbeat story of an Alpine skiing village, which Hjortsbergs friend Thomas McGuane called, quite possibly the finest comic novel written in America. In the 1970s, Hjortsberg wrote two science fiction novels, Gray Matters (1971) and Symbiography (1973), as well as Toro! Toro! Toro! (1974), a comic jab at the macho world of bullfighting. His best-known work is Falling Angel (1978), a hard-boiled occult mystery. In 1987 the book was adapted into a film titled Angel Heart, which starred Robert De Niro and Mickey Rourke. Hjortsbergs work also includes Jubilee Hitchhiker (2012), a biography of Richard Brautigan, American writer and voice of 1960s counterculture.