“Like Raymond Carver through Goth-coloured glasses” said the Sunday Times when Susan Compo’s story collection Malingering was first published.  As the Goth subculture of the 1980s/90s experiences a resurgence of interest, the time is ripe to rediscover them. As participant and observer, she 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 depict so brilliantly 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 . . .

“A dazzling time capsule that, once re-opened, brings back in vivid and lurid detail a counter-cultural moment that spanned cities and continents, uniting lost souls under layers of black hair dye, bleach, mascara, torn fishnets and smeared lipstic . . ..” CATHI UNSWORTH, author of Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth

“As if Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson had cloned a child in a test tube and made her write.” KIRKUS REVIEWS

“In her second collection, Compo delivers with more short, poetic chops . . . The values here are strictly eighties, and the talent she shows goes well beyond her peers. Compo is confirmed as a true force on the inner-outer edges of fiction. BOOKLIST

Susan Compo grew up in Orange County, California, where she published the pioneering “ ´ “ (subtitled The Fanzine for the Blank Generation. She is the author of two story collections, Life After Death and Malingering, and a novel, Pretty Things, as well as A Wild Life, a biography of Warren Oates. Her most recent book is Earthbound: David Bowie and The Man Who Fell To Earth. Her next book, David Bowie and ‘Cracked Actor’: The Fly in the Milk, co-authored with Mark Wardel, will be published in September 2023.