Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving [Paperback]

Martin Millar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 13, 2010

Elfish’s friends live hand to mouth in a bleak section of London, squatting, seeing local bands, getting high, and feeling bitter over lost ambitions. Except Elfish, who pursues exactly what she wants with demonic single-mindedness.
Elfish rarely eats, never washes, and is devoted to Queen Mab — both the Shakespearian fairy, “deliverer of dreams,” and her thrash metal band, formed with her attractive but dimwitted lover, Mo. When Mo jilts her and calls his new band Queen Mab, Elfish is determined to keep the name for her own band and sets about getting revenge. To stop Mo, Elfish is obliged to steal, cheat, and lie to everyone around her. Happily, Elfish is a compulsive liar, and quite fond of cheating and stealing.
On the night Mo’s band is to play, he and his friends laugh cruelly around her. The people she has deceived turn on her viciously. It is up to Elfish whether to give up hope or to rally, proving to all the power of her will.
A fearless stage diver and shameless purveyor of bad sex, Elfish stands alone. Surrounded by people who have given up hope, only she will not put down her guitar. Only she refuses to stop dreaming.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The grubby demimonde of London's Brixton district serves as the backdrop for this low-rent rock-and-roll tale. Millar's treatment of Elfish, a self-absorbed, indifferently promiscuous, and hygienically challenged young woman engaged in a revenge quest against Mo, her former boyfriend and bandmate, whose penchant for promiscuity is as ripe as his sexual encounters are squalid, reads like a less refined Trainspotting. Elfish's machinations focus on naming her nascent thrash band after Queen Mab, the fairy queen and wish-granter of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Not coincidentally, Mo wants to use the same name for his new band, and he offers a deal: if Elfish can memorize Mercutio's 43-line soliloquy, he'll cede the name. Elfish's quest to get her way is rife with variegated but always shameless machinations, and Millar laces dry, droll humor throughout his depictions of his antiheroine's lies, manipulations, and unabashed self-regard. Elfish's lack of charm provides a wry, even satisfying twist that resolves many subplots and inadvertently gives this antifairy many of the same powers ascribed by the Bard to Queen Mab herself.
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From Booklist

Elfish and four others squat in a crumbling three-story house in the run-down Brixton section of London. Years of such housing complement her hand-to-mouth lifestyle of hangovers, metal music, and failed ambitions; but when ex-boyfriend and ex-bandmate Mo forms a new band with the old group's name, Queen Mab, Elfish feels compelled to reclaim the name for her own, as yet nonexistent, band to play her own music. Struggling for visibility and success in the local club scene, she turns to stage diving—that is, forcing herself through onlookers, achieving the stage while the musicians are still performing, and drunkenly leaping into the audience, thereby entering the “transcendental state of the dedicated stage diver.” A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do, and the life that results, in which chronic depression and bad outcomes are assumed, may leave few unmoved. Fair warning, though: filth, bodily fluids, and vomit mix freely with sex and substance abuse in Millar's 1994 opus, here receiving U.S. publication these many years later. --Whitney Scott

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (April 13, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159376233X
• ISBN-13: 978-1593762339
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #519,483 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Martin Millar Rules The Universe!, June 9, 2010

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greyfell "greyfell" (SANTA CRUZ, CA, US) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving (Paperback)

If you haven't read Martin Millar, you need to get this book, "Lonely Werewolf Girl," "Lux the Poet," "Love and Peace With Melody Paradise," every single word the man has written because he is one of the underground's best kept secret treasures. And he's ready to hit the big time.
Martin Millar is one of the greats. Up there with Charles Dickens, Thomas Pynchon, P.G. Wodehouse, James Joyce, and Gregory Corso. Don't miss this guy. He's unbelievable.