Join Strange Attractor Press in celebrating the launch of Ken Hollings’ latest book Inferno.
Doors Open 7pm
With DJs, trailer reels, readings and books for sale.
“ Why do we find ourselves so attracted to the cheap and the vulgar, the discarded, misshapen and abject?
What do we really mean when we say that something is ‘so bad it’s good,’ and what, finally, does it say about us?”
Part personal confession and part historical roadmap of tales from the underground and exploitation movie scene in America during the 1960s, Inferno takes the reader on a journey deep into the heart of the trash experience. Hollings offers a complex and intricate timeline of connections, coincidences, and resonances that have mostly gone unnoticed. Tracing the transmission of ‘the Purple Death’, a deadly and exotic virus first depicted in an old episode of a Flash Gordon movie serial, Hollings traces a vector of contagion through the films of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger and into the output of exploitation pioneers including Ray Dennis Steckler, Herschell Gordon Lewis and Russ Meyer.
Turning his idiosyncratic gaze upon key aspects of teenage culture during the 1960s, Hollings examines the world of hot rods, Rat Fink, surfers, bikers and beach parties, uncovering a secretive and hidden universe of masks, fake identities and secret desires. Even Dante would think twice about taking this trip into Hell.