Please join Strange Attractor Press in celebrating the publication of Purgatory: Towards The Decay of Meaning by Ken Hollings, part two in Ken Hollings’ Trash Trilogy.
This volume is focussed on European trash culture from the Renaissance to the present, told through the eyes of Dorian Grey and Tony Hancock, with a huge supporting cast that includes Paracelsus, Judy Geeson and Diabolik.
Ken will read from his book, copies of which will be available for purchase and signing.
Doors: 7pm
Free Entry
"You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful: no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange."
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books
Trash is the charnel house of traditional values.
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, British artist Basil Hallward sets off for Paris, intending to take his greatest artwork with him. In the 1961 film The Rebel, another British artist, Anthony Hancock, also sets off for Paris, intending to take his greatest artwork with him. Seventy years may separate the two stories, but very little else.
For this sequel to 2020’s Inferno, Ken Hollings turns his attention to Europe at the height of decadence and decay, following the twin fates of Hallward and Hancock as they are drawn, like so many nineteenth-century artists, towards the French capital. It was here that August Strindberg struggled to turn iron and carbon into gold, while esoteric aesthete Sâr Péladan staged his sumptuous Salons de la Rose+Croix.
In thirty-three essays modelled on Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, personal reflection, historical incidents and unexpected mythological correspondences combine to unearth a restless underground of alchemists, poets, painters, and philosophers.
Their influence would shape the future events of May 1968 and presage the emergence of a uniquely European form of Trash cinema devoted exclusively to beauty, sex and despair. Hollings’ radical retelling reveals that, while Hell may be a tough act to follow, Purgatory can be just as weird and far more dangerous.
"You’re all raving mad. None of you know what you’re looking at”.
Anthony Hancock, The Rebel.