Scatterpunk Press | Novel 'Lorna' by Zoe Marie Bel

Fiction

Lorna

A love story about dreaming on a tightrope in contemporary Los Angeles, by Zoe Marie Bel. This special edition also features Bel's L.A. short story 'Jerks', plus a preview of her novel 'After The Angels'.

Form: Novel (with short story 'Jerks')
Specification: Paperback, 228 pages
Publishing: November 2nd 2026
Purchase from: Wherever books are sold (featured bookstores listed below).
ISBN: 978-1-9193481-1-7
RRP: US $11.99 · GB £9.99 · EUR €10.99
Request an ARC (Advance Reader Copy): If you are a professional book reviewer, or a fiction enthusiast with a significant online following, please contact Elle at media@scatterpunk.com to express your interest in reading 'Lorna'.
Download the one-sheet (poster): Hi-res PDF (5 MB) | Lo-res PDF (397 KB) | Lo-res JPEG (754 KB)

*Outlet list will launch closer to publication date

The Blurb

When love can't keep you

Tyler is an aspiring writer from the Midwest who meets his first great love when she's perched on the lowest rung of Hollywood and he's sleeping in his car. With nothing but the breath in their lungs and each other, they set out to make Los Angeles their own.

Their turbulent relationship is recalled years later, after one of them has endured and the other has not. A tragic but tender love story about the weight of dreaming when nothing is affordable, opportunity has a security camera, and toxic escapism is everywhere.

*Outlet list will launch closer to publication date

Download a sample of 'Lorna'

PDF (2.7 MB), download opens in new window

Download now

Download now

A Few Words With The Author, Zoe Marie Bel

Above: Zoe Marie Bel, author of 'Lorna'. Photo by Jaimie Kourt.

Your first novel 'Valérie' was also a love story named after the woman the narrator loves. Is 'Lorna' a related work of sorts?
While in no way a series, the two novels might be thought of as companion pieces. They both seek to capture the experience of being in love with someone struggling to make a life of their creative passion. At the same time, these are two very different worlds, both on their surface (different city, different characters, different problems) and at their depths. 'Valérie' was very much a contemplation of artistry, and the complex interplay between artistry and survival. (As a love story, that novel resolves only when both lovers recognize that love itself - caring for a person we consider beautiful - is a form of artistry.) 'Lorna' is much more about identity, and how our dreams can be both advanced and impeded by our sense of who we are.

Specifically, Lorna identifies as a professional actress, although her tax returns don't really support that.
Yes but, yikes, I personally do not look to the IRS for the measure of an artist. Emily Dickinson's first book of poetry was not published until four years after her death, and she likely made not one cent from the ten or so poems of hers published in her lifetime. And yet who would seriously contend that Dickinson was not a poet?

The argument might be that Dickinson's work earned her not money but formal consensus that she was talented. In our capitalist times, isn't the highest form of consensus around your talent receiving payment for it?
Okay, but there is a level of faith in that - in the mechanisms for discovering and rewarding talent - that I find misplaced. I think in the popular imagination talent is perceived as a light of its own. With persistence, so it goes, talent will therefore get noticed as inevitably as light in the gloom. I disagree. I see talent as dew weighing on midnight grass - only noticed if someone runs light over it, when it glints back. You might do everything you possibly can to put yourself in the path of that exposure, but ultimately you have no control over it. It's a game of chance, and those are characterized by casual brutality. I've encountered people, particularly in L.A., who are stupendously talented, and yet they are no more registered in the creative landscape than the drone of an A/C unit four blocks over. Their problem is not talent but access to illumination of their talent.

Tyler and Lorna, with their tiny poolhouse that lacks running water and their infinite rent issues, would seem to have very little access to illumination of their talents.
You got that right. And I would say that that is increasingly the experience of young creative people in Los Angeles, who are facing a cost of living crisis that would leave any honest accountant stuttering. No wonder so many coulda-been-visionaries in their twenties instead become transactional influencers posing with thirty-dollar edamame salad at Erewhon (hashtag 'lifemaxxing').

At one point Tyler gets defensive about Lorna's talent, noting that some people attribute her fate to self-aggrandizement. Does it matter whether or not she is truly talented?
Personally, I see enough in the early accomplishments of her short career for the yay or nay of her talent to be answered definitively. My reader will decide for themselves, though. But it's true that this is not a question the novel prioritizes. Their diverging fates are shown instead as owing more to Tyler centering his creative identity completely, whereas Lorna does not. She has a second rival identity.

You mean 'addict'. Which, as Tyler observes, Lorna says like 'ice hockey player' or 'bookworm'.
Even more than that - she says it like 'left-handed'. She clings to this idea that her recreational use of various narcotics represents an immutable characteristic of herself. She is able to convince Tyler of that too - at least enough to have him feel like a despotic asshole for demanding she change. He wants her to change, for sure, but, more than that, he wants to keep her. The classic enabler's dilemma.

That's how you see Tyler? As an enabler?
With absolutely no judgment, I do. And I think Tyler would agree - including on the no judgment part (although he'd perhaps express it as the pointlessness of judgment). Lorna likes to see herself as moving smoothly along the lines of her own inevitability. Well, that's equally true of Tyler. His inevitability is that he loves her. It lights him up inside to see her happy. And she keeps representing what ends up becoming the chemical scaffolding of her life as happiness.

Tyler surely knows better, though, by the time they're in Larchmont and she's an unemployed hologram of who she used to be?
By that time, the bitter disappointments are piling up in them both. Self-fulfilment is mounting in Tyler, just as self-abandonment is pinning Lorna to that couch. I have no doubt that period in their relationship is the one most torturous to Tyler looking back. Because the corrosively bittersweet truth of it is that this period was foundational to the success that Tyler has – it is implied – since gone on to have. His is not so much survivor's guilt as thriver's.

Tyler is a midwestern transplant to Los Angeles. Lorna repeatedly depicts some of their thorniest differences as an urban-liberal versus rural-conservative divide. Is that how you see it?
Ha, not at all. Don't forget that Lorna herself is an adopted Angeleno, and, in fact, had a similar upbringing to Tyler, albeit without the religious aspect. Flattening Tyler's views on drug use to sociopolitical conditioning is just another way for Lorna to dodge accountability for her choices. (I'm as urban and liberal as they come, and I feel the same way as Tyler about drug use. I find the implied glamor of getting high totally baffling. I see a synthetic experience, a contrived experience, and an experience that requires no especial talent or distinction. So you see... not about politics.)

You write as a man in this novel. Was there a creative rationale?
No, only curiosity. (Men have been ventriloquizing as women for centuries, so I make no apology.) I wanted to explore heterosexuality with neither guy nor girl relinquishing dominance. If either Tyler or Lorna is ever submissive, it's because they are building power quietly on their own terms. There's a lot of grappling going on beneath the surface, but I think in that they are basically equal.

And the moral in a love story like this? Careful who you fall for?
Oh my gosh, no. Love like Tyler's and Lorna's is an unmarked road, and I truly believe that in so many moments along it the full vastness of the landscape was open to them. Beauty and disaster in equal measure. It would be wrong and reductive to say they were 'doomed' from the start. I guess the moral is that, for some people, you will take the unmarked road. Accept that, and then meet where it leaves you with kindness and grace. And don't break your writing hand on the wall for them afterward.

About The Author

Zoe Marie Bel is a writer of fiction and poetry, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review, Australian Book Review, Short Édition, Mystery Tribune, and more. She was educated in English Literature at Oxford University, and in real talk at various bus stops and laundromats around the world, particularly those of Los Angeles. 'Lorna' is her second novel. Follow news and read online pieces at zoemariebel.com.

Find A Bookstore

*Check back regularly: list frequently updated

On November 2nd 2026, 'Lorna' will be available for purchase wherever books are sold, around the globe. Closer to publication date, we will list featured bookstores below for your convenience, and to thank these stores for their support. But know that you can visit any bookstore and order in the book if it is not already stocked there. Simply quote the ISBN: 978-1-9193481-1-7.

Find A Library