All fiction is at some level dreamy, or it wouldn't be fiction. And the recent novels from the bizarro, alternate L.A. aren't the most masterful fiction in the world. But they're the only American fiction that always looks beyond life's veil--to me the only fiction that's really worth reading.

           Sometimes when I go to bookstores--where the first thing apparent is that our culture writes much too much and needs to shut up, needs some fundamentalist-futurist Ministry of Thought to cut us back to two or three nice books a year--I try works by Richard Russo or Vikram Seth or Annie Dillard, skilled outsiders, realists. The characters and manners are rendered deftly, the circle of life full and complete. But that's the problem. For all their storytelling, they only corroborate the veil of the senses. You feel reassured by them, or you should, but five minutes later, you smell a rat. Because who says the circle of life should be trusted?

           And if you've surrendered, somewhere in the course of an L.A. childhood, to distrusting what the rest of the country deems familiar, the distrust becomes what's familiar, the local strangeness reassuring.

           So I read Joy Nicholson's "The Road to Esmeralda," in which an L.A. writer, haunted by his chicken-hawk dad from Yucca Valley, flees with his girlfriend into Mexican doom, post-Sept. 11. While not actually bending the laws of physics--delirium in the jungle is so real it's practically ordinary--this book is prophetic: It chases the vanishing L.A. dream straight out of L.A., finding no corner of the world unspoiled, no innocence left.

           Or I read Erickson's "Our Ecstatic Days," in which the portal to history, conscience and maternal memory is a black L.A. lake that fills the lower floors of the Hotel of the Thirteen Losses, whose hallways are sailed by a doctor learning to specialize in buildings that are dying of grief. When a mom dives into the vortex to recover her lost son, her voice becomes a river of type that bisects each of the next 231 pages, then rejoins the text when she's back, sucking air--a typographical stunt so exacting that, rather than try to replicate it, Simon & Schuster opted to publish a jpeg of the author's original manuscript.

           Or I wait for Carolyn See's upcoming novel about Los Angeles circa 2005-2015, originally titled "Slipstream"--which word, she didn't know, doubles as a synonym for magical realism. But coincidence is so common around this literature, you start to expect it.

           Francesca Lia Block's "Necklace of Kisses," which, somewhat chancily, picks up Weetzie Bat in her punkette 40s, feels unintentionally sad in its denial of aging. But I understand the soul-starved core. Mourning a marriage whose courage has shrunk after Sept. 11, the heroine channels lost youth by making out with mermaids at a pink hotel.

           If you include writers with one foot in fantasy/sci-fi--if your L.A. vision leans toward time travelers and mermen with vestigial gills--the list becomes a catalog: Octavia Butler, Kem Nunn, James Blaylock, Scott Bradfield, Tim Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson, and all the descendants of Philip K. Dick.

           Sometimes this L.A. literature jumps the ropes of literature itself. In film it's Robert Towne, the L.A. writer's successful half- brother in Hollywood, finally directing his version of John Fante's "Ask the Dust," whose desert-grave epiphany you could see trying to happen in Towne's script for "Chinatown." It took him 30 years to get the backing. ("Some pictures are jobs," he told Variety, "but others become obsessions.") And the urban theorist Norman Klein, who in another metropolis might set off a manhunt with nets, is not only at work on a "cinematic database novel" but also leads "anti-tours" of the city's "erasures" (lost pasts) and "social imaginaries"-- such as trucked-in Victorian homes that create a "collective memory of an event or place that never occurred but is built anyway."

           Even a New York Times op-ed by Bruce Wagner--whose screenplays and novels of decadent Hollywood have drawn comparisons to both Charles Dickens and William Burroughs--began with mayoral politics and wound up staring at blackened hills:

           . . . and as I am writing this I am even forgetting who [Jim Hahn] is and I am trying to remember who Antonio Villaraigosa is--I keep giving him the name "Vargas" in my mind, like the illustrator who used to do those pin-up paintings for Playboy, Alberto Vargas-- but now I am remembering that he's the new mayor, I either dreamed that or it's true, and all any of us can do is hope that he will do something terrible or scandalous or flat-out crazy so we may always remember who he is and not think we are seeing his picture in a group photo in "The Shining" or starting to read about him in a newspaper that no longer exists and is crumbling in our hands before we can even finish.

           The miracle being, perhaps, that an editor at the New York Times understood the twisted reality behind those lines. Or pretended to, in the spirit of bicoastalism. Or caught on that a story was breaking out West that might not be understood until it was too late in the Eastern news day to report it. There's about that much connection left between Los Angeles and the hapless, but commercially attentive, outer world: They get that we're closer than they are to the vortex.

           Which isn't to say that visionary writing never happens back there. You hear sometimes of people in New York City who've dreamed. Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist" created a world of elevator maintenance that merged into the metaphysics of race and ascendance. Bernard Malamud concocted a talking Jewbird, and Paul Auster wrote about a vaudevillian runaway learning to levitate. I also think I see a parallel in Ben Katchor's "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer" cartoons: the dream-time back alleys, the almost plausible wholesale signage (Mortal Coil Mattresses), the vaguely theosophical insomnia clubs, with marathon lectures and fluorescent lights up bright.

           But the origin of those dreams always turns out to be some fixed point in the definable past: the industrial age, the melting pot, the gothic South. Those writers don't actually step outside time. They don't gaze into eternity for a living--although the Mojave wind may shift in their direction from time to time. "But what is the meaning of this?" John Cheever asked in his diary, freaking out while writing "The Swimmer" (a 1964 short story that some MR fans claim as magical realist). "One does not grow old in the space of an afternoon. Oh, well, kick it around."

           Martha Sherrill says that at one New England party, after Time magazine called her novel magical realist, she was told never to use "those two words" together in a sentence. "It's a missing hormone, more than a place, I think," she says of L.A. "A part of me, a chemical."

           "The only [other] place I can imagine it happening in this country is in the South," says Erickson. "Because in a way you could argue that the novels of Faulkner provided a basis for the fabulism that came out of South America. That whole idea of a mythical county, with mythical people. The stories aren't fabulous, but there's certainly enough psychosis in them to push them into the realm of the surreal.... I just think that cities like New York or Chicago are too impenetrable to allow for the kind of breakdown that makes for fabulism. There's something about the porousness of L.A.'s identity."

           Erickson's own dance with New York publishers hints at the divide. "They'll call my agent and ask when another book's coming. And when it comes, they'll say, 'Oh. Well. We didn't know he was going to do that.' "

           It's not enough to say that L.A. writers have a taste for the apocalypse. Carolyn See still writes the end of the world, but mostly to think happy thoughts--she excises the Judgment from the end. Maritta Wolff's recently published 1972 time capsule, "Sudden Rain" (recovered, according to the book's PR, from the late author's icebox), had been more jeremiad: The only principled character watches from the ocean as Malibu Canyon ignites. Likewise Didion's modern Babylon, in which the ramifications of adulteries and abortions would not be bribed quiet by the California dream. If these '70s writers were more open about the dream's underside than their literary heirs have been--a generation possibly unwilling, in the midst of the culture wars, to give comfort to religious moralizers--you've got to wonder if Armageddon is really passe or just on hold. In either case, it has lost a lot of its bang.

           What's unique here is as near as Salvador Plascencia's mythic curanderos and lettuce pickers in El Monte, and Norman Klein's "erasures" of neighborhoods that may or may not have been, and Ry Cooder's aural ghosts of Chavez Ravine. The civic foreground crumbles. The dirt lots bloom. Playwright Jose Rivera, in "Cloud Tectonics," posited a Mexican hitchhiker who's been pregnant for two years. "The Anglo mind," says Rafael Luevano, who teaches religion at Chapman University in Orange, "might be giving way to the Latino influence of magic, myth and symbol."

           "The stories my grandparents told me," explains Plascencia, "were like Steinbeck, but with magic and witches."

           Whether Latino or not, our literary visions are sometimes incestuously provincial--a pidgin of images that couldn't have been composed anyplace else. Joy Nicholson says she hosted foreign guests at her Silver Lake apartment, first-time visitors who marveled from the picture window: "It's so ugly! It's so beautiful!" (They also refused bus directions to the Getty Museum--"We'll just walk"--a visual that could inspire a jungle novel all its own.) Ugly beauty is why L.A.'s fabulist literature, although better than the rest of the country's, will never be the country's, unless L.A.'s death- wish strangeness fades out first. Here, when Francesca Lia Block confronts oleanders, they "look like cigarette cherries," and an anorexic character has "hip bones like part of an animal skull." Here, Kate Braverman's junkies accuse the surf with their tears and the waves grow spines, and beauty and loss are inseparable, as every Angeleno knows they are. Nicholson describes in an e-mail how she used to walk into the desert after dark, calling death's hand:

           I'd heard there were bikers and killers and freaks there, and I wondered if they would find me, and if I might come to a bad end with them . . . I just wanted to know if I would snap out of my numbness. . . . (Obviously I wanted my father to rescue me--so I put myself in the "driest, worst desert" again and again--to see if he would come through. I guess maybe I was waiting for an Oasis to come to me.)

           For me, it was always man-made lakes--starting with the guitar- shaped pond in Encino behind the mystical Thriftimart "T." But I'm not alone there either. Joan Didion invoked the same location in "Play It As It Lays." Erickson's new book has made our improbable lakes the very image of breaking through to the other side, and when my new protagonist swoons for lost paradise, he swoons lakeside. He swoons thinking about rounding a certain bend on Mulholland Drive, where time peels away, leaving in its place one of those fenced, forbidden vistas--a cobalt blue reservoir in the lap of a canyon a half-mile across. Wholeness, temptation and loss, in a single glance. He swoons because alongside the Encino reservoir, the hills seem to stare directly into Utah, and because even when living in L.A. you long for it a little, as if it can never be your city altogether.

           Of course, if you're a writer who depends on staring into Utah from Encino, you get used to some uneven results. What you don't expect is to keep bumping into other writers in their sleeping gowns. You don't expect to keep finishing each other's dreams. In the first short story I ever sold, a young heir to a swimming-pool business gets lost in Death Valley looking for a chapter president of the Lainie Kazan Fan Club. In Block's first book, from about the same time, a young guy stumbles upon a covenly chapter of the Jayne Mansfield Fan Club. In Sherrill's first novel, after a car crash in the desert, a reporter stumbles upon the ghosts of film stars at a hotel pool; in Plascencia's, a lettuce picker has his way with Rita Hayworth.

           Several of these L.A. writers, I should mention, are more or less friends. I solicited a book blurb from Erickson because he's my hero, and from Sherrill, whom I knew from UCLA and who had the same favorite movie no one else could stand: Harold Pinter's surrealist adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon." (It ends in whiteness--a soundstage mirage.)

           Stephen Cooper, who wrote the newly reissued biography of John Fante, "Full of Life," was briefly my graduate professor at Cal State Long Beach, and as I was writing this essay he coined a name for this new school of writing: Southern California Dream Realism. So I talked him into driving with me to the desert. I had two reasons: I wanted to chase the ghost of Fante's Arturo Bandini to the spot where he lost his Mayan Princess, and I wanted to talk about Fante's themes generally.

           Every Los Angeles writer at the outskirts of vision feels a connection to "Ask the Dust," the 1939 novel that, more than any other, seems to weep over this city's corpse in the ecstasy of possessing it. ("Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.") Claremont McKenna professor Jay Martin has pointed out that what W.H. Auden called "West's Disease"--an L.A. collision of foolishness, desire and illusion named after Nathanael West--could just as well have been named after Fante. In any case, we all are sufferers. We're not sure, exactly, how the intimacy of our suffering will survive the novel's journey to the screen, to the masses, to the world. But for a while longer, it's strictly ours.

           Cooper's history with "Ask the Dust" is even more proprietary, but it's also personal. "I was seeking to fill that absence that I didn't even consciously know defined me," he says. "And that was the loss of my father. So I would spend my days just mooning around, moving about, like most young writers, haunted by characters, trying to compose them and failing, failing, failing, failing, failing. . . . And then when I came upon 'Ask the Dust,' it was a time in my life when I was living with every pore open to possibility."

           Living, in other words, like Bandini himself, who finally writes his look-at-me novel, only to hurl it to the sands where his goddess went mad. "He's gotten what he wanted, in terms of having written the book . . . to be on the shelf next to the big guys. But desire is such that it outlives its fulfillment. And so he must desire something else. . . . It turns to dust, doesn't it, the fulfillment of desire. So getting what you want is, if you will, just a beginning of the eternal and unattainable story of desire."

           The ethnic tension between Fante's lovers (an Italian and a Latina) was exquisite too, and Fante tried to turn up the heat under the L.A. melting pot in an unfinished novel titled "The Little Brown Brothers," full of romantic impossibility in, among other places, a Wilmington cannery. But editors, Cooper says, misread the work as racist, and it was shelved.

           "So we don't know how he would have worked this out. John knew how to cuss people out, but everything he wrote proves that he was doing his best to negotiate this core aspect of our culture. In fact, the only person I ever showed 'The Little Brown Brothers' to-- because I'm such a Boy Scout about all this--is Philippe Garnier, who translated 'Ask the Dust' into French. And Philippe said, 'Oh, thees must be published!'

           "Now I'm thinking," Cooper proposes, "what if X number of your visionary writers--I'm just riffing now--but what if Steve Erickson read these hundred pages? What if, name your 10 writers, they could respond however they wanted to? What if 60 years later, a group of writers read this and--not to finish it, but to take up the vision however they wanted to?" I ask if the tensions in the book still read fresh today.

           "Well, yeah. As fresh as they will remain until the republic is a cinder."

           I tell Cooper it would be interesting to name the issues of our times that even L.A. novelists are afraid to address without fears or dogmas. Nationalism. Religion. Abortion. "It's sure not any longer sex," Cooper says, although sex's omnipresence as distraction from life's issues is becoming an issue all its own.

           Joshua Tree when we park is disarmingly still. We climb over some boulders from the dawn of time, throw pebbles across a chasm, hear them strike. It's the kind of emptiness, behind the mirage, that makes you forget what you came for, or what people back in the city are writing for--not a bad place, all in all, to hurl a manuscript.

           But minutes later, it happens--one of those desert-vision ruptures of reality. Outside a convenience store in Yucca Valley-- home to Joy Nicholson's war-buff antagonist, graveyard to Robert Stone's dying soldier--beside the monster trucks and SUVs, a half- dozen Marines in camouflage lounge atop an armored jeep, materialized but ghostly. They look a little like the plastic troops from "Toy Story." You can see them with your mind's eye, and you can hit them with a stone, and they move in slo-mo through the liquor- deli traffic. It's like the scene in "The Day of the Locust" in which actors in period costumes improbably collide, or the back-lot earthquake in "The Last Tycoon," with marooned extras, jungle backdrops and schooners interposed "like the torn storybooks of childhood," or the scene in ... well, never mind. Stone or Nicholson would have known what to say about it, and someday maybe one of them will.