Los Angeles

Los Angeles is the novel’s setting, but it is more than a backdrop: its dispersed neighborhoods and automobile routes structure the characters’ movements, while its familiar institutions and homes become difficult to read as safe. In the narrator’s account, the city shifts from the apparent paradise of the 1981 summer to a landscape of surveillance and danger after Robert Mallory arrives. Decades later, the narrator returns to Los Angeles and finds that the past remains inseparable from the place where it happened.

A City of Separate Routes

The geography of Los Angeles is experienced through streets, canyons, freeways, and cars. During the summer of 1981, the narrator describes late-night drives through Studio City, Sherman Oaks, Encino, and Tarzana, then back toward Mulholland Drive. The next morning, despite those long nights, the narrator still reaches Buckley in uniform just before class. This repeated circuit gives the city an ordinary, traversable quality: its distances are absorbed into teenage routines, and the car seems to make its driver independent of them.

That mobility also makes the city difficult to observe as a whole. In the 1980 home invasions, attacks began across neighborhoods on the San Fernando Valley side below Mulholland, from Studio City through Sherman Oaks and Encino, with incidents also reported in Bel Air and Benedict Canyon. Later, reports spread to Pasadena, Glendale, and Hollywood before stopping and resuming in December. The shifting geography creates uncertainty about where danger begins or ends; apparent distance offers no dependable protection.

Cars turn this urban sprawl into a means of pursuit. After seeing Robert and Matt Kellner together at Buckley, the narrator follows Robert’s black Porsche from Stansbury Avenue onto Valley Vista Boulevard, then toward Beverly Glen and Ventura Boulevard. The narrator is close enough to track the car through traffic but cannot clearly see Robert through its small rear window. Later, on Benedict Canyon, the narrator watches Robert pull into a secluded house, waits, and then drives past again. The sequence makes the city legible only in fragments: turns, traffic lights, glimpses of a car, and a house set back from the road.

The City’s Changing Atmosphere

The narrator retrospectively sets the summer of 1981 against the arrival of Robert Mallory in September. The summer is remembered as nearly paradisiacal; September marks the end of that dream, as a previously unnoticed signal seems to begin calling out and the city takes on a darker cast. The account does not claim that Robert caused every unsettling event. Instead, his arrival coincides with a wider sense that the familiar city is becoming strange, and the narrator acknowledges the temptation to connect events whose relationship was not yet clear.

That unease includes the Riders of the Afterlife, a cult whose members appear in neighborhoods and test the boundaries of private property. The narrator reads a newspaper account of their trespassing and confrontations alongside a report of another home invasion in Woodland Hills. The report repeats clues associated with the intrusions: preceding phone calls, rearranged furniture, and a missing neighborhood dog. For a moment, the narrator wonders whether the cult is responsible for the break-ins and disappearances. The connection is speculation, not a confirmed identification; its importance lies in how competing stories feed the narrator’s growing fear.

As the Trawler’s crimes become public, the city’s geography becomes part of the killer’s reported method. The narrator reads that the Trawler and associates moved through Los Angeles at night, selected neighborhoods, watched potential victims, and sought homes suitable for attack. The article names familiar forms of public and suburban space—streets, shopping areas, and parking lots—as places from which people could be watched or followed. Los Angeles’s openness and mobility therefore carry a double meaning: they enable movement, but also make it possible for surveillance to remain difficult to detect.

Familiar Places Under Threat

The home is one of the city’s central spaces of apparent privacy, yet the reported invasions make it vulnerable before an assault even begins. The Trawler’s pattern includes missing pets and signs that someone may have entered a house in advance. In a Woodland Hills report, the dog’s disappearance, rearranged furniture, and earlier calls belong to the same chain of warning signs. The residents do not initially know that they are part of a pattern, and the city’s many separate homes make those signs hard to connect in time.

Other familiar places become entangled with the narrator’s personal investigation. In Palm Springs, the narrator follows Robert and Susan Reynolds to Las Casuelas Terraza, a restaurant associated with the narrator’s childhood. The familiar building and its surroundings do not settle the narrator; the narrator watches from across Palm Canyon Drive after tracking their car. This is one of several episodes in which remembered familiarity and present suspicion occupy the same urban landscape. Los Angeles itself remains the primary setting, but the pursuit reaches beyond it and reinforces the extent to which the characters’ movements depend on cars and roads.

The narrator’s sense of danger also gathers around the beige van. Recalled sightings place it at Buckley on the night the Griffin was desecrated, in a parking garage on the first day of school, and in an alley after an incident at the space on Melrose. In Palm Springs, the narrator recognizes that some remembered sightings may be imagined and that the van’s connection to Robert remains unproven. The vehicle nevertheless becomes a recurring sign of the narrator’s belief that separate events may belong to one concealed pattern. Its presence makes Los Angeles feel watched without establishing who is watching or why.

Return, Memory, and the City

The adult narrator returns to Los Angeles after almost twenty-five years away, following a life that included moving to Manhattan and establishing a writing career. The return is motivated in part by the death of a partner, but it also brings the narrator back to the city where the events of 1981 took place. Initially, the narrator believes that greater distance and resilience might make it possible to write about that year and enter its story without being overwhelmed.

That confidence fails while the narrator is drafting notes about the Trawler. At home in Los Angeles in 2006, the forty-two-year-old narrator becomes so distressed by memories of Robert and the past that an ambulance takes the narrator to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. After regaining composure, the narrator understands the crisis as a response to memory rather than a physical illness and leaves before the hospital’s proposed overnight tests. The city is thus not simply where the past occurred: returning to it, and writing about what happened there, makes the past newly immediate.

Much later, as the narrator begins another version of the book, Los Angeles remains the ground on which competing memories meet. The Trawler mystery no longer dominates the project by itself. The narrator describes the book as turning toward Matt Kellner, Susan Reynolds, Thom Wright, and Debbie Schaffer, and toward the desires and losses that endured beyond the events of 1981. The city’s narrative significance lies in this double role: it contains the original events and the adult act of revisiting them, while offering no guarantee that either the place or its history can be made fully safe or settled.