SUICIDE BLONDE

'Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?' Greeted as shocking, daring and scandalous on publication in 1922, the swirl of bourbon, dyed blonde hair and vaginal lips is audacious, but also feminist camp, and writing which moved with invention and forcefulness into a new field like other outlaw writers Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs. Turning wine vomit into glittering burgundy ribbon, as in 'Pig's head dropped lower. She gagged and a long line of glittering burgundy ribboned down the stairwell.' Set in the San Francisco of the early 90s, of the Lusty Lady, like all of Steinke's novels, this has been lauded for its 'gorgeous prose'. Jesse is a 29 year old adrift in San Francisco's demi-monde of sexually ambitious, drug-taking outsiders, desperately trying to sustain a connection with her bisexual boyfriend. She becomes caretaker and confidante to Madame Pig, a grotesque, besotted recluse. Jesse also meets Madison, Pig's daughter or lover or both, who uses others' desires for her own purposes, and who leads Jesse into a world beyond all boundaries. An intensely erotic story of one woman's sexual and psychological odyssey, and a modern cult classic. The New York Times said, 'Hallucinatory, dystopian... A disturbing, poisonous fable.' 180pp, paperback.