The Negative Author:Michael Covino Michael Covino's The Negative is a debut novel of stunning narrative strength and uncommonly incisive dark humor. It's a story about the movie industry, a story of Hollywood at its most excessive and funniest, a story of a world-class, half-mad director and his attempt to create the perfect film. A shrewd black comedy, The Negative explo... more »res the psychopathology of the artist and the artistry of the psychopath. Doug Lowell, an avant-garde filmmaker turned successful mainstream director, is one of the most powerful people in the movie industry. He's sequestered himself in the editing bunker on his estate in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where he has just finished the sequel to his earlier commercial and critical hit, The High Plateau of Stars. He has bankrolled it himself, but - driven, self-destructive, with nightmares scaling the walls of his sleep - he has gone thirty million dollars over budget and come in two years late. He's reluctant to let it go - it's not quite perfect (far from it, Doug reflects ruefully) - but under immense pressure from his lawyers, accountants, and business manager, he delivers it to the negative cutter. Then - a phone call. The final-cut negative is... missing. Hence, a story of electrifying surprises and jaw-dropping reversals is set in motion: the story of a film director, a Cornell-educated mobster's son, a loopy untenured professor of popular culture, and his offbeat student lover, nobody's fool. It is a world where things are not what they appear to be, where reality magicks into its opposite. As The Negative accelerates toward its startling, wondrous, and harrowing conclusion, it establishes Michael Covino as a supremely gifted writer in the front ranks of American novelists.« less