Publisher's Synopsis
A wry comic mystery set in Los Angeles --the land where dreams go to die-- The Naked Raving Empty is the story of one desperate man's attempt to win the love of a fickle and perhaps sociopathic woman through a single act of brazen fraud. But in a culture where lying to yourself can be the only way to survive, fraud can sometimes reveal a deeper truth.Our hero's girlfriend has a boyfriend of her own, the other woman in his life is a drug-addled agoraphobic, and his only remaining friend is a fast-talking aggressively gay hustler with a penchant for dangerous stock swindles. The future looks bleak. So in a desperate act to revive his flagging career, Randy resorts to fraud. He creates a mystery, a wholly manufactured conspiracy around the sudden death of failed television actor Jack Kane, and he tries to sell this story to the highest bidder. But if the conspiracy is a lie, then why are so many people suddenly trying to stop him? "We believe in what we want after all; and we want what we cannot have. This I knew all too well from experience. But what came new on the floor of the holding cell was the final lock-step end to this reasoning--we believe in what we cannot have. So I would give them what they wanted, a conspiracy to grace their past with interest. I would pretend I had a mystery and interview the men and women of Jack Kane's life, recording their real responses to a mythical plot --the gold dildo that killed him and its mysterious disappearance."
