Light House: A Trifle, a 2000 satirical novel by American screenwriter William Monahan. Originally serialized in the Amherst literary magazine Old Crow Review from 1993 to 1995, Monahan sold Light House to Riverhead Books, a Penguin Group imprint, in 1998. Warner Bros. optioned the film rights while the novel was in manuscript and hired Monahan to write the screenplay adaptation. The novel was delayed for two years, with plans to release it alongside the upcoming film; however, the film was never produced. In 2000, Light House: A Trifle was finally published and garnered critical acclaim: The New York Times proclaimed "Monahan's cocksure prose gallops along", and BookPage Fiction called Monahan "a worthy successor to Kingsley Amis". The story follows an artist named Tim Picasso who runs afoul of a drug lord and seeks refuge at a New England inn in the middle of a nor'easter. It is a work intentionally referential to the satirical novels of the early 19th-century British author Thomas Love Peacock, such as Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey. Plot summary The story begins with a painter named Tim Picasso who suffers critical rejection from his peers and decides to take a break in the Caribbean, where he ends up crewing on a drug smuggling sailboat. When the captain gets drunk and falls overboard, Picasso takes the boat to Florida, and meets up with Jesus Castro, the lead drug smuggler. Castro intimidates Picasso into running the drugs from Miami to Boston, however after Picasso collects the $1.5 million payment from the Irish Republican Army, he escapes by train to the New England town of Tyburn, where a winter storm is picking up force. He decides to lodge at the seaside Admiral Benbow Inn for the weekend, until he can depart for Italy. Meanwhile, Mr. Glowery, a bitter New York City journalist and writer who believes that a rival author is sabotaging his literary career, arrives in Tyburn where he is to speak at a fiction workshop being held at the Admiral Benbow Inn. He is immediately tasered by one of Castro's detectives, who mistakenly confuses him for Picasso. Back at the Admiral Benbow Inn, the innkeeper, George Hawthorne, worries about Mr. Briscoe, a cross-dressing contract worker who is stranded in the abandoned lighthouse just off the coast because of the raging nor'easter, while his unhappy wife, Magdalene Hawthorne, threatens to leave him. The next morning, Mr. Glowery is