Mike Sager is to drugs, porn, and crimes of desperate delusion what Dominic Dunne is to the society murder. In addition to his long-classic Rolling Stone story "The Devil and John Holmes" (which helped inspire the upcoming Val Kilmer film, Wonderland) and his groundbreaking GQ piece about murdered Irish investigative reporter Veronica Guerin (also the subject of a major film starring Cate Blanchett), Scary Monsters and Super Freaks is a wonderful rogue's gallery of up-close pieces about the most public failures of the American dream. From Rick James and his drug-fueled detour into white slavery to the life and suicide of porn starlet Savannah, from deep inside the beating of Rodney King and the Heaven's Gate cult suicides to Chuck Berry's sexual predilections, this book brings to high-profile true crime a highly identifiable voice and style. Currently Esquire's Writer-at-Large, Sager takes us along for the ride with a raft of other figures including the late NWA Rapper Easy E. Winner, the FBI agent who fell in love with his informant, and the highest ranking DEA agent to be busted for drug trafficking. This is a brilliant debut collection by one of America's most respected and stylish crime writers.
Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter. He's been called "the Beat poet of American journalism." For more than a dozen years he has worked as a Writer-at-Large for Esquire magazine.
Sager's career in journalism began in 1978, when he quit law school after three weeks to take a job on the graveyard shift as a copy boy at The Washington Post. Eleven months later, he was promoted to staff writer by Metro Editor Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame. Sager left the Post after six years to pursue a career in magazines. His first collection of articles, Scary Monsters and Super Freaks, published in 2003, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, as was his second, Revenge of the Donut Boys, published in 2007. His first novel, Deviant Behavior, was published by Grove/Atlantic's Black Cat in April, 2008. A third collection, Wounded Warriors, was published in October, 2008 and received the Military Writers Society of America Founder's Award and the American Author's Association Golden Quill Award.
A former Contributing Editor of Rolling Stone and Writer-at-Large for GQ, Sager has also written for Vibe, Spy, Interview, Playboy, Washingtonian, and Regardies. He is also Editor-at-Large for WordsETC, the first black-owned literary magazine of South Africa.
For his stories, Sager has lived with a crack gang in Los Angeles; ex-pat Vietnam veterans in Thailand; a 625 pound man in El Monte,CA; teenage pitbull fighters in the Philadelphia barrio; Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; heroin addicts on the Lower East Side; Aryan Nations troopers in Idaho; U.S. Marines at Camp Pendleton; Tupperware saleswomen in suburban Maryland; high school boys in Orange County. Eight of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired Hollywood films.
Sager has read, lectured and held workshops at the schools of journalism at Columbia University, NYU, the University of Illinois, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Missouri, and in various other forums; his work is included in textbooks presently in use in college classrooms.
Fifty-three years old, Sager is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Emory University, and a former intern at the pioneering Atlanta alt-weekly Creative Loafing. He lives with his wife and son in San Diego, California. He is a past recipient of La Jolla Youth Soccer's "Competitive Manager of the Year" award.
He is at work on a second novel. He can be reached though his website, www.MikeSager.com.
