Amazon.com Review
Dennis Cooper, best known for his transgressive novels of gay teen angst and brutal sexual longing, has adapted one of his early short stories into this large-sized, punked-out graphic novel. Tracing the early career of Trevor Machine, rock star on the rise, Cooper manages to parody the L.A. teen scene as well as all of popular culture. The superb, surrealistic drawings by Keith Mayerson bring Cooper's descriptions and dialogue to new heights of demented parody and social commentary; it is if
Antonin Artaud and
Keith Haring took the wrong drugs and collaborated on a kids cartoon show.
Horror Hospital Unplugged is artistic cross-pollination of the highest order: smart, shocking, and always just over the line.
From Publishers Weekly
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 Sempe 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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
