Star People [Kindle Edition]

`Star People' is set in West Hollywood. Matt Walsh is a film action-hero, rumoured to be gay, but keeping his private life private. That is until he falls for a young hustler called Billy West. Matt is protected by his publicist Lee Carson, but with the amount of enemies she has, she might be more of a hindrance than a help!

I bought `Star People' because I loved `Lovers and Losers.' Unfortunately, the quality of the writing (and the jokes) is nowhere near as good. Whole chapters are dedicated to giving back stories to characters, I would much rather have learnt about them during the course of the story and this felt like a lazy way of writing. The ending is also abrupt and unsatisfying, and you can predict what is going to happen about half way through the book.

It's a shame to say, but I'd give this one a miss and read `Lovers and Losers' instead

Having read Burston's "Lovers and Losers" I was looking forward to more of the same albeit with the setting transposed from London to Hollywood with "Star People", what I got was a lot of interesting characters a lot of background and yet not enough action. This novel left me wanting a lot more. I felt that the plot had only just started when suddenly that was it - over!

Burston can certainly write, his characters were well rounded and full of interesting backgrounds and quirks, the plot was bubbling away nicely and was just starting to heat up when it seemed that it was cruelly snatched from me and I'd arrived at the final chapter where everything was wrapped up in a few pages. I had similar feelings towards Burston's "Lovers and Losers" which I felt should have been a lot longer, but at least I felt suitably satisfied by the last page of that novel, this one left me feeling quite cheated.

I thought this book was ok, I read it all and wanted to know what happened at the end, but it wasn't brilliant. I was actually quite dissapointed, because I got it because I like 'Lovers and Losers' by Burston.
I didn't really think this book had much of a plot and nothing really happened in the first 100 pages either. Like others have said this is more like an essay on the clichés of Hollywood and it is true. Not only that, a lot of the text seems to be simply copied and pasted further on in the book. For example, Matt Walsh being a bad actor, then he is an ok actor but he may play himself, then more discussion and background knowledge about his acting abilities. There are many other examples of the same things being repeated over and over again. There are also many characters that are talked about in depth, but bear no relation to the plot, or even next page.
Also the back cover talks about how Simon Fowler could ruin everything, but he does not actually play a big part in the book.
I also found some of the clichés unnecessary. Like Casey, the gay who is also a Catholic, who also enjoys ritualistic orgies. Really? And Lee Carson the mean manager. I also found it, not sexist, but maybe a little misogynistic. For example one part said something like 'PRs are often bitches (they are usually women)'. I don't think it was sexist in any way, but in a book or the world of the author, it just seems to portray heterosexual women as nasty. It is often unnecessarily crude in places too, like on page 148 'he was young, dumb and full of cum'.
I like Burston as an author, I really enjoyed Lovers and Losers, so much so that I made my friend buy it (it was 20p) and he uses a large vocabulary but I just don't think this was his best book.