Bøger af Susan Compo

As the Goth subculture that flourished in the 1980s and '90s experiences a long overdue resurgence of interest, the time is definitely ripe to rediscover Susan Compo's short stories, hailed at the time as "like Raymond Carver through Goth-coloured glasses" (Sunday Times).As participant and observer, Compo was immersed in the music and fashion scenes in London and Los Angeles during those years, and writes about them with wit and compassion but also brutal honesty, capturing in her fiction the exhilaration and the despair of the times, the desires and foibles of its protagonists.What makes her stories exceptional, though, is the way the surface reality they detail so sharply 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 . . .

Life After Death is a deep dive into the subcultures of Los Angeles and London in the 1980s as glam turned to punk and goth. Susan Compo captures the lives of aspiring musicians, scenesters, and obsessive fans-lives in which reality is a constant threat to cherished illusions, and death, while never far away, is sometimes not the end of the story.

A revealing exploration of The Man Who Fell To Earth, Nicolas Roeg s classic 1976 film starring David Bowie as an alien who comes to our planet in search of water.

Booklist called Susan Compo “smart, sassy, and tough,” while Publishers Weekly praised her “witty, unflinching prose.” Following two highly regarded story collections, Susan Compo’s first novel takes a sharp-eyed look at LA's culture industry. Giselle Entwistle has her hands full with her roster of demanding show-business clients. There’s Adon, struggling to make the transition from teen idol to mature star with the aid of a goatee. There’s would-be rock impresario Hedda Hophead, “aggressive as junk mail and just as relentless.” There’s country singer Len Tingle, whose career has as many ups and downs as his love affair with Giselle; and Tupperware demonstrator extraordinaire Troy Harder, “a living legend in food storage,” who Giselle fears might want to plastic-wrap her. Not to mention child prodigy belter Frances Culligan, who seems to have disappeared. And then there’s Pandra, whose haunting memoir of growing up in suburban Orange County and coming of age in '70s glitter-era Los Angeles (platform boots, Rodney’s English Disco, The Real Don Steele Show, David Bowie clones) forms a book within this book. Giselle hopes to get Pandra’s story published, but it does bring up this little matter of a possible murder in Pandra’s past . . .