When I had first decided to write a Jungian Thriller set in Los Angeles, I remember attending a weekend conference called “Myths of L.A.” It featured many wonderful speakers and the overriding theme was the collective “shadow” of the city of L.A., it’s underbelly.
One speaker said she imagined L.A. as the Hindu Goddess Kali with the freeways her circulatory system. What a great image. Here is a passage I finally cut from my manuscript where the main character of the book, Animus, imagines that:
He seemed to enter a dream-state, imagining the Goddess Kali, mistress of death and destruction, her dark skin lounging across L.A. County, 50 miles tall, the freeways her veins and arteries, the fingers of two of her right hands dipped in cool ocean water, the other two arms flailing to the East, scratching high desert sand. He thought about Los Angeles perched on the edge of the Western world. A city of binary differences. Sunshine and noir. And yearly fires threatening destruction and purity.
Only in L.A.