Horror Hospital Unplugged

by Dennis Cooper, Keith Mayerson

Overview

“Stunning.. . . Youthful angst is rarely portrayed as this terrifying.” —LibraryJournal

DennisCooper and Keith Mayerson’s boundary-breaking graphicnovel Horror Hospital Unplugged is back in a long-awaited reissue.Crystallizing a primal period of creative experimentation for both Cooper,whose Frisk­-era storytelling is at its finest, and Mayerson,whose gritty, unadorned visual style would later explode into color, HorrorHospital Unplugged is a vital piece of underground comics craft. The moody,kaleidoscopic, and sexually charged story of would-be rock star Trevor Machine,and his flirtations with love, fame, homosexual identity, and the disaffectionof youth, is a provocative immersion in world of ambition, confusion, anddebauchery—and an crucial glimpse at the early creative achievement of two culticons.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062004345
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	06/28/2011
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 10.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Dennis Cooper is the author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels: Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His other works include My Loose Thread; The Sluts, winner of France's Prix Sade and the Lambda Literary Award; God, Jr.; Wrong; The Dream Police; and Ugly Man. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Paris.

Keith Mayerson's art appears in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and galleries and museums around the world. He is on the board of trustees at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art and teaches at New York University and the School of Visual Arts.

Editorial Reviews

Beautifully adapted into comics form from a Cooper short story, Horror Hospital Unplugged chronicles the sudden rise to the precipice of fame (and the equally abrupt fall) of a young L.A. rock band and the funny, profane and touching sexual journey of Trevor Machine, the band's handsome, self-destructive, gay lead singer, the kind of disaffected young hero characteristic of so much of Cooper's fiction. But Cooper's themes have been wholly transformed by the brilliantly inventive, psychologically obsessive, black-and-white drawings of Mayerson, in an hallucinatory graphic style that is at once expressive, whimsical and representational, with stylish elements ingeniously grafted from fine artists like Redon and cartoonists like Semp and Arnold Roth; as well as from Japanese manga and American comics. Cooper and Mayerson have produced an hilarious satire of the record business (and a vicious sendup of David Geffen and his celebrity coterie) that is also an idiosyncratic (albeit somewhat melodramatic) queer love story that graphically details the ever-present social white noise of sexual desire, the frustration and possibilities of love, and the sudden calamity of loss. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Acclaimed novelist Cooper delivered a powerful commentary on the recording industry as well as an ode to youthful sexual ambivalence in this narrative (first published as a short story in Wrong, Grove, 1992). The work focuses on Trevor, the sexually confused vocalist for the rock band Horror Hospital. Trevor journeys through several sexual liaisons before finally receiving instructions in the art of love from the ghost of River Phoenix. Mayerson's stunning black-and-white illustrations create the alienation and ambivalence necessary to move this horrific but compelling story along. Youthful angst is rarely portrayed as this terrifying. Though not a good choice for libraries just starting to collect graphic novels, it is recommended for libraries with advanced collections.Stephen Weiner, Maynard P.L., Mass.

Library Journal