Carleton Eastlake
Monkey Business
(Red Hen Press, May 2022)
Featured on Hasty Book List’s “2022 Debut Authors and Their Publishing Daydreams”
When William Fox, a TV writer on location in Florida, is dragged by his show’s toxic producers to a “gentleman’s club” that’s just appeared outside town, he meets Nicole, a mysterious dancer who claims to be an anthropologist searching for signs of rational life on Earth.
Enchanted by her both playful and serious ideas exploring love, limerence, power, monkey behavior, paintball combat, creativity, and the dilemma of a rational mind compelled to serve an animal’s body by feeding it fantasies, Will falls in love—and his ever more troubled love-struck behavior and the acidly destructive battles among his producers and network executives during the production of his show soon begin to illustrate Nicole’s theories.
Nicole is charmingly romantic on a cruise up the Space Coast, but nothing about her seems authentic. After she warns she’ll soon leave and his producers are humbled by an uncanny encounter with the police, Will begins to wonder, is Nicole staging real world events with him and the producers as her experimental subjects? And if so, can he discover her true identity, learn the lessons she’s trying to teach, and earn her love before he loses her forever?
Praise for Monkey Business:
“Carl Hiaasen, make way for Carleton Eastlake. Monkey Business is a brash and bawdy hero’s journey – and wicked fun from start to finish.”
– Julia Glass, National Book Award winning author of Three Junes
“Carleton Eastlake has written a raw, jarring, darkly funny primer and philosophical treatise on navigating the politics of television and lust that’s dressed up as a noir novel about a man driven to near madness by the Machiavellian mind-games of his bosses and soul-ravaging sex with a mysterious stripper.”
—Lee Goldberg, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
“One Midsummer Eve, a young, put-upon TV writer meets a fairy queen in the form of a sibylline exotic dancer obsessed with anthropology, the failure of Darwinism, and Chairman Mao. What unfolds is a captivating, clever, Freudian escapade through the vicissitudes of love, power games, paintball, and the irrationality of human behavior.”
—Karen Essex, best-selling author of Kleopatra, Pharaoh, Leonardo’s Swans, Stealing Athena, and Dracula in Love: A Novel
“I don’t know which I admire more: clever wordplay, amusing textual Easter eggs, a delightfully enigmatic leading woman, or an unabashedly candid self-aware narrator. All these elements combine to make Monkey Business a fascinating read, but not an easy skim. Carleton Eastlake enjoys the unique perspective of an executive show business insider, and as one who has shared those gilded trenches, I’m pleased to vouch for his authenticity and relieved that I’ve never had to experience the tortuous track of his narrator’s romantic entanglements.”
—Carl Gottlieb, author of The Jaws Log
Carleton Eastlake began his career in creative writing while an undergraduate at UCLA when he served as a staff writer for a California Assemblyman’s campaign.
He has an undergraduate degree from UCLA in political science and psychology and graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School with a concentration in law and the social sciences.
After a career in public policy and consumer protection law including work at NASA, the Federal Trade Commission, and in private practice, he broke into Hollywood as a writer of science fiction, crime, and espionage dramas. Being hired as a producer on Steven Spielberg’s series seaQuest confirmed him as a science fiction writer-producer.
He has shared in an Edgar Award and Saturn Award. After spending eight years on the Board of the Writers Guild of America West he now sits on its Membership and Finance Committee. He is a past President of PEN Center USA.
His wife Loraine Despres is a best-selling novelist, television writer, and tree-farmer. They live in California.