Take a ride with Paul Wilborn’s ‘Florida Hustle’ – Yahoo News

It’s a classic road trip story: a young man’s quest for freedom, independence and the love of the star of straight-to-video horror films known for her ear-piercing scream.

Hey, it’s Florida.

“Florida Hustle” is the first novel from St. Petersburg author Paul Wilborn. A former reporter for the then-St. Petersburg Times, the Tampa Tribune and other publications, he’s also a musician and playwright.

His day job is running the Palladium Theater in St. Petersburg, but lately he’s trying his hand at fiction, with resounding success. Wilborn has lived in and observed Florida in all its weird glory for most of his life, and it shows.

Wilborn’s first book, “Cigar City: Tales From a 1980s Creative Ghetto,” published in 2020, is a collection of short stories that grew out of his experiences living and hanging out in Ybor City in the 1980s. “Florida Hustle” shares the same historical era but moves to the other side of the state: Palm Beach, West Palm Beach and the Everglades in 1982.

You might think 17-year-old Michael Donnelly has it made, living in a waterfront Palm Beach mansion. But he’s a sad and lonely kid, still traumatized by his mother’s suicide and largely friendless because he’s been home-schooled.

The only joy in his life is horror movies. He’s especially obsessed by the films of legendary Italian director Mario Bava — and by Dawn Karston.

Dawn has starred in a string of very, very low-budget slasher movies, struggling to build a career on that eardrum-shredding scream and a smile “that had launched so many teenagers on ill-fated trips to old campsites, or high school football fields, or deserted soda shops where masked killers lurked.”

Michael’s dream is to become a filmmaker, and he believes he can raise Dawn’s career to a new level — he has a million movie ideas, if only he could tell her about them. He spends much of his time drawing storyboards for his potential movies, all of them culminating in a raised knife and Dawn’s scream.

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When he hears that she’s making a movie in the Everglades, he’s thrilled. It’s his chance to connect.

But Michael’s father, Alex, is not thrilled. He’s the amiable figurehead CEO of a successful avionics corporation founded by his father, so his family’s public image is important. And just six months before “Florida Hustle” begins, a young man named John Hinckley had shot then-President Ronald Reagan and three other people — because he was obsessed with movie star Jodie Foster.

Disturbed by the storyboards and Michael’…….

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/ride-paul-wilborn-florida-hustle-150000752.html