Customer Reviews

Horror Hospital Unplugged: A Graphic Novel

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Keith Mayerson lends his vast artistic talent to Dennis Cooper's short story about a fledgling L.A. band and its confused singer, Trevor Machine. Mayerson's art swipes from a range of art and illustration, from symbolism to manga to advertising. The style changes as the story develops and Mayerson nimbly leaps from panel-based narratives to splash pages full of meandering, stream-of-conscious maps and montages. Some drawings are neat and tight, while others are scrawled, streaked, and scratched to abstraction - especially in the sex scenes, where bodies coupling (or tripling) become a manic mishmash of skulls, grotesque penises, and scattered ink blots. As seen in Spiegelman's Maus, Mayerson is clever in depicting some characters as animals or shapeshifting freaks. Dennis Cooper's story is a hilarious satire with some touching scenes and a sad ending, the tragedy of which is no match for the irony sculpted by Cooper. Trevor Machine goes into cult history as the sexually confused, angst-ridden teen of popular lore, in line with Holden Caulfield and Tommy Gnosis - and he has such a perfect ass.

Dennis Cooper, Horror Hospital Unplugged (Juno, 1996)

One has to wonder whether Cooper has the same morbid fascination for the movie Horror Hospital evidenced by others of my acquaintance. Why else would he name his wannabe-Nirvana characters after a relatively obscure (and not so relatively silly) British B movie from the seventies? This graphic-novel adaptation of a Cooper short story details the lives of four youths in a band called, not surprisingly, Horror Hospital. Their lead vocalist, Trevor Machine, seems to attract (...) men wherever he goes (and comes out with Cooper's favorite line, "But I'm not (...).", as many times as a number of his other characters, despite its ringing just as false; it would almost be refreshing to meet a single Cooper character who's secure in his sexuality), resulting in failed relationships that Machine mines for his self-obsessed lyrics. Things get even weirder when David Geffen takes note of the band, and Machine is visited by the ghost of River Phoenix. Folks, you can't make this stuff up. Except that Dennis Cooper, in fact, has.

The book is drawn by usually-competent artist Keith Mayerson, and there are certain panels where his competence comes through; for the most part, though, it looks rather like Mayerson was drawing in control-freak-Ronald-Searle mode, but without Searle's particular eye for biting satire. Coupled with the usual Cooper ulta-postmodern disdain for plot linearity, the whole thing ends up coming off, more than anything else, as hard to read, and not in the good way other Cooper works (e.g., My Loose Thread) are hard to read.