CULVER CITY

In this YA novel, two teenage boys sneak onto a film studio backlot and encounter ghostly manifestations of characters from the movie Gone With the Wind.

Fourteen-year-old Cassady and 15-year-old Kyle live in Culver City, California. They hang out together all the time—smoking weed and fantasizing about girls—but what truly cements their friendship is their shared love of MGM’s Backlot 2 studio, a fenced-off wonderland of abandoned film sets. Throughout 1969, Kyle and Cassady sneak onto the backlot and use it for their make-believe adventures. But one night in 1970, the game changes. The friends find themselves enveloped by a supernatural blue haze (“the Sift”) and, within it, meet Scarlett and Ashley, spirit amalgamations of the film characters Scarlett O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes and the actors, now deceased, who played them. The Sift brings to life a cornucopia of movie and television settings and stars. Cassady and Kyle are invited to stay. But as Kyle begins to fall for Scarlett, Cassady catches glimpses of something evil lurking behind the facade. Is the Sift truly a gift, or will it grab hold with demonic claws and tear them apart? Vickers writes in the third person, past tense, from Cassady’s viewpoint. The prose style is unaffected, capturing the spirit of the late ’60s and early ’70s and teenage life in Culver City at that time. As characters, Kyle and Cassady may speak more to nostalgic older readers than young adults, but they are well portrayed—starting as nigh interchangeable protagonists yet reacting differently to the Sift and finding their own sense of self. Indeed, the story serves admirably as a coming-of-age parable, and the speculative element allows for a mix of historical perspectives (’70s teens looking back at actors/characters from the ’30s reflecting 1860s values). The book starts slowly but gains momentum and will pull readers in as the stakes rise. The only impediment to effective storytelling is a dialogue style that often loses itself in disclosures aimed primarily at readers. At one point, Kyle observes: “On one hand everything looks normal, but there’s an undercurrent of weirdness in the air that I can’t put my finger on.” Nevertheless, Vickers lends a gritty realism to the fantasy, leading to an unexpected and powerful ending.

An authentic, potent, and unsettling blend of yearning adolescence and magic turned sour.