Malingering

Susan Compo's fiction vividly depicts the punk and Goth underground scenes in London and Los Angeles in the 1980s. As participant and observer, she was immersed in the '80s music and fashion worlds of both cities, and she writes about them with wit and compassion but also brutal honesty, capturing the exhilaration and despair of the times, the desires and foibles of its protagonists. In every respect Compo is a worthy heir to those great satirists of the pre-war demimonde, Dorothy Parker and Dawn Powell, and we're proud to reissue her story collections, Life After Death and MALINGERING, and her novel, Pretty Things, in the Visible Spectrum series. As the Goth subculture that flourished in the 1980s and '90s experiences an overdue resurgence of interest, the time is ripe to rediscover Susan Compo's writing from the period. What makes Compo's stories exceptional is the way the surface reality they detail so brilliantly is shot through with a curious, dyed-black magic: a daylight-shunning bedsit dweller is visited by a mysterious lover whose angel wings keep getting in the way; a pizza-delivery boy is waylaid, Gulliver-like, by tiny ghosts who literally stitch him up; a foursome out clubbing are abruptly transmuted into Ken and Barbie dolls, missing their most precious parts . . .