Savage Recreation

Ian Bloom wrote Savage Recreation at age 24 in summer residence at the Bowery Hotel, New York—financed by a phantom movie director, fueled by cigarettes, suits, and the city’s slow rot. A surreal odyssey through appearances, realities, excess, and deception. Somewhere in between, Bloom was cast in the Warner Bros. film The Nice Guys to smoke cigarettes opposite Ryan Gosling—then came the story: Bloom showed up moving like a movie star and the room went quiet. The machine hesitated. The moment got reassigned. Ever the gentleman, Bloom took a nap and let the stuntman inherit the frame, courtesy of directorial permissions.

His second novel, Savage Recreation, is a corporate fever dream—Notes from the Underground in a tailored jacket, Naked Lunch rewritten as a board memo. A hallucinatory plunge into surveillance capital, pharmaceutical mind-control, and sex as operating system. Revolutions become brands. Desire becomes protocol. The city becomes a lab. Bloom wrote it while reading Gravity’s Rainbow—but only up to the casino: enough to learn the architecture, not enough to get lost inside it.