2007

235mm x 156mm

Hard covers

First publication

128pp

ISBN 978 086130 1171

The Torture Queen of Heroin Chic

Lucy Swan's debut novel is a malevolent work of conceptual innovation; a picaresque overdose of dangerous narcotics that mashes body art fury, Holocaust decor, kill thrill hysteria and disenfranchised magic into an unwholesome concoction as deadly as the drugs its characters consume. A provocative new Savoy collaboration which amplifies the Lord Horror mythos in an unexpected way.

In The Adventures of Little Lou, Lucy Swan refashions her own persona to create a psychotic feminine foil for the masculine anti-heroes of David Britton's novels.

This authorial stratagem makes The Adventures of Little Lou a golden motherfucker of a book. Sharp as a butterfly blade and blessed with a shot of vicious humour running through its veins, this transgressive volume leaves the compromised meanderings of Kathy Acker, Poppy Z Brite and Elizabeth Young looking as limp and bloodless as one of Little Lou's discarded victims.

Jacket design by John Coulthart.

To acquire a copy of this book, see the Mail Order page

Not so much your average fantasy fare, The Adventures of Little Lou is more incredibly weird Dr. Mengele mutated characters enhanced-stating themselves through a sado-masochistic, post-Nazi racist alternate reality, trailing nihilistic havoc around them with complex sentence structures. Which is nice.

Lucy Swan has a prose-terrorism pedigree of sorts, and a grounding in controversy. This first novel follows some earlier short stories that—in addition to Little Lou, her own creation—utilise characters from David Britton's novel Lord Horror, and its subsequent notorious spinoff comics series including Meng & Ecker, the first comic ever to be banned in this country.

The writing is hard to pin down—it's an interesting trawl of the grotesque and explicit, taking us through nightmarish urban landscapes filled with the children of an ancient Doktor Mengele, his post-Auschwitz experimentees walking, drifting and crawling through streets in a drug-induced state of hallucinogenic horror. The language is almost impenetrable at times, but it is undeniably inventive and provocative, exuding heavy sexuality like a tongue poking through a gimp mask. The main character, Little Lou, has a foul mouth, an S&M fetish and a heroin addiction. We first meet her charging steel pins in her body into an explosive electric orgasm, shattering her sensibilities into the dead end of a paragraph. Our leading man, Doktor Mengele, has a very tall but withered body and drinks Bloody Marys composed of Polish vodka, fresh human blood and Worcester sauce. Not bereft of humour, the characters and dialogue constantly push the reader, with curious moments of reward and horror in equal measure.

This isn't porn for weirdos, though—it's a satirical exploration of a society bereft of morality, of ethical values, of sensitivities and emotions, that unfortunately never quite manages to convince. Still, it's got a set of Siamese Cat-Girls, a Carnal Palace, a Street of a Thousand Twats and a cameo by James Joyce. Chances are its not going to be your cup of tea, but if you pass it in a bookshop, be sure to say hello. Where else are you going to read a line like: "The Meng's thick tongue curls out and cups the bloody buck knife as though relishing a cornet on Blackpool Pleasure Beach"?

ROSE WOODHOUSE, DeathRay

In The Adventures of Little Lou Lucy Swan grabs fascism with both hands and gives it a hot, surrealistic shag, So she should. If the ridiculously misogynistic Martin Amis and his ilk have declared certain subjects artistically off-limits, all they've done is restrict themselves. That's their loss.

So let's enter the world of Little Lou, a parallel universe where Dr Mengele—the Atrocity Angel of Auschwitz—has spawned two surgically-created 'sons', Meng and Ecker, and rules a twilight hell of his own. Far more radical than Clive Barker and his fellow splatter-freaks, Swan doesn't merely rely on shock value; she takes Nazi ideology and gives it a severely Cubist twist, layering horrific montage upon montage. The result is black, genocide humour seen through the eyes of Dali, and it's as addictive as nails through a willing scrotum.

Far from advocating Mengele chic, Swan ridicules Nazi values through the good doctor's bizarrely modified flesh; he's a pathetic, Frankenstein's monster of his own creation. That's not counting Meng, his scalpel-built 'son', best described as Iggy Pop with tits, and his brother Ecker, a vegetarian, size zero psychopath!

So thank Christ there's one spark of optimism in the book, Little Lou herself. A spunky, hard-fisted and electrically powered junkie, she's a free spirit dedicated to fucking Mengele over big-time. Literally festooned with piercings, tattoos and scarifications where the sun doesn't shine, she makes Amy Winehouse look like a Girl Guide! That's definitely my kind of girl, but a true Torture Queen TAKES pain as well as gives it, and Lou's threshold is sky-high! It has to be; Mengele's one tough, vicious cookie, as tough and demanding as Swan's beautifully exact, but dauntingly dense prose.

Screw Harry Potter whimsy. Lou's quest is fuelled by smack, the Holy Grail of addictive substances. As users from William Burroughs to Keith Richards make blindingly clear, smack insulates the parts other drugs cannot reach, and frees up stunning, single-minded creativity. Better still, it stops users being distracted by external bullshit; it's equally effective screening out English whinging and Nazi demagogues!

So no wonder Lou's smacked up to the gills throughout the book, and it's a quality that gives Swan's writing an intense, amniotic intimacy and conviction.

SASHA DE SUINN, QX Magazine #679