Destiny Express

DESTINY EXPRESS

Destiny Express is set in the filmmaking community Berlin in March 1933 – the month in which Hitler solidified his power. It is the story of that era’s most creative couple: director Fritz Lang and his scenariste Thea von Harbou – who were also husband and wife. We watch the rise of fascism, the breakup of a marriage, and stare head-on at one of cinema’s grand enigmas: how could two intimate collaborators like Lang and von Harbou – who together made M., amd Metropolis, among others – see the world so similarly. Until Hitler seized power, and one of them stayed to make films for the Reich, while the other fled on the first available train.

PRAISE & REVIEWS

“Daringly imagined and darkly romantic—a moral thriller.”
Thomas Pynchon

“What Rodman has done is hard, he’s written an historical novel which is dazzling for its restrained use of history. The painfully accurate sensitivities of Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou are the real subjects of the book. Sentence by careful sentence, the resonance between what they see and how they see gives Destiny Express a quality of sober reflection that becomes quite beautiful.”
Michael Tolkin

“Remarkable, passionate, inventive…all the words misappropriated on behalf of drivel: they truly belong to this compelling first novel. Not only a fine read, but the emergence of a Writer of Note.”
Harlan Ellison

“Rodman, with his own sharp eye, has written a most original photogenic portrait…”
Samuel Fuller

“The sleek facade of Lang and von Harbou’s marriage is depicted in the novel with the artfulness of one of their exquisitely structured screenplays… Precise, convincing detailing of how it feels to have the ground you walk on give way beneath your feet… Lang’s alarming yearning for his wife and the deep black pool of loss that lies beneath is sparely, deeply poignant.”
Deborah Mason, New York Times Book Review