I Should Have Stayed Home by Horace McCoy Review

Set in 1930s Hollywood, a strapping young Southern lad tries to make it as a movie star but only manages to catch the eye of a wealthy old socialite who makes him her toyboy. Lessons - really obvious ones - are learnt…

Horace McCoy’s I Should Have Stayed Home (a title that sounds like something Droopy Dog would say!) is rightly unknown compared to his much better novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Maybe at the time - the 1930s - it was more shocking to most to find out that Hollywood is a bad place full of bad people but, nearly 100 years later on and with the likes of Harvey Weinstein in the headlines everywhere, it stopped being news to everyone a long time ago.

Though known as a pulp writer, McCoy’s material is less trashy and more quaint when seen through today’s eyes: one “red hot” scene features the guy and the old lady watching a porno and then having sex - gasp…

What’s definitely more shocking is the breathtaking racism of our “hero”. In the first party scene, he wants to beat up a black man for kissing a white woman. Yowzah. I guess you have to make allowances for the time - civil rights was decades away, segregation in many states was still in force, and miscegenation was strongly taboo - but it doesn’t make modern readers like me want to root for the protagonist at all!

Then again, nothing made me like the guy - he was much too stupid! He wants to be a movie star but it never occurs to him to take acting lessons and when an agent tells him to lose the southern accent he doesn’t even try. Just sleep with a rich old lady with connections and it’ll all be fine - until you step in front of the camera! What a dope.

McCoy’s writing is quite snappy - it is an eminently readable novella - and I did want to see where it was all headed, if only to see how batty the pulpy melodrama could get (the answer, disappointingly, is not very - but there are a couple of silly OTT moments here and there). Still, it’s definitely not enough to make it a good book and I can easily see why I Should Have Stayed at Home is out of print - if you’re interested in this writer check out McCoy’s much better book They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? instead.