“Mount Terminus” by David Grand

Sequestered in a villa up in the hills of pre-Hollywood Los Angeles, Bloom and his father Jacob live apart from society—but it is only a matter of time before their dramatic pasts catch up to them in this dark, thrilling novel about art, family, and the birth of Los Angeles. Check out our Summer 2014 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Mount Terminus” by David Grand.

September 22, 2014

Mount Terminus was the summer 2014 LARB Book Club pick. To join the Book Club, where we put you in conversation with editors and members and send a copy of the selected title to your door, become a LARB Friend member today.


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David Grand’s Mount Terminus is a dark, majestic novel about art, family, overwhelming love, and the birth of Los Angeles.

After his mother’s death, young Bloom boards a train with his bereaved father, Jacob, to travel west across mountains and deserts to California: Mount Terminus, their new home at the desolate end of the world. There, in a villa built atop a rare desert spring, they live apart from society, supported by the income from Jacob’s invention, the Rosenbloom Loop, a piece of technology that has revolutionized the nascent art of filmmaking. There, Bloom grows up in the shadow of his father’s grief, with only a pair of servants, the house’s ghosts, and his own artistic muse for company.

But Jacob can’t forever protect his family from his past — the dramatic series of events that has taken him from the Hebrew Orphan Asylum on New York City’s Lower East Side and into the graces of beautiful twin girls, and finally to this fragile refuge in pre-Hollywood Los Angeles. And Bloom, now an eccentric dark genius, can’t live alone at the top of the mountain forever. Prodded by his newly discovered half brother, in every way his opposite, Bloom will have to come down to meet the world. Otherwise the orange farmers and the vaqueros, the speculators and the developers, the artists and the barons of the silver screen, will surely come up the mountain to meet him.

Triumphant and enthralling, Mount Terminus marks a magnificent return for David Grand; it’s the novel he was born to write.

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David Grand is the author of Louse and The Disappearing Body. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and twin sons.


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To view all Book Club picks, please visit the LARB Book Club page.