Signal Hill Stories by Alan Rifkin Stories of spiritual longing and romantic illusion, or vice-versa, in the holy rubble of Los Angeles Five stories track boys and men as they navigate among the ghosts and mirages of greater Los Angeles. Rifkin’s male protagonists are part fuck-up, part primal force, and full of longing-for fathers, for mothers, for sex, for faith, for just getting it right. A one-time actor staggers toward his demise and clings to a ledge of possibly lunatic faith; a young boy is haunted by cosmic loneliness in the form of a medical encyclopedia; the heir to an absent father’s wealth can’t quite bring himself to claim his portion. Far from the metropolitan glitz of Hollywood and downtown L.A., these stories take place in the off-the-grid, suburban neighborhoods of stucco-dwellers. Among car lots and strip malls, dusty brown hillsides and oil derricks, the ordinary becomes epic in the contested terrain between faith and doubt, love and sex, spirit and flesh, reality and illusion.