High life

the long version

"Hollywood, the City of Dreams. Jack had gone there with one ambition: to become famous, a star, exactly how he didn't care. He just wanted to be like the people whose lives he followed in gossip magazines: Tom and Nicole, Brad and Gwyneth, Johnny Depp, Bruce Willis... Instead he found a world more seedy than anything he could have imagined, a world of whores and deceit, snuff shows, incest, drugs - and despair. After his wife, Karen, a hooker, is murdered and disemboweled, he meets Bella, a beautiful woman of immense wealth. In her he sees a chance to make his dreams come true. As it turns out, though, his nightmare is only beginning."--BOOK JACKET.