Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Elfish’s friends live hand to mouth in a bleak section of London, squatting, seeing local bands, getting high, and feeling bitter over lost ambitions. Except Elfish, who pursues exactly what she wants with demonic single-mindedness.
Elfish rarely eats, never washes, and is devoted to Queen Mab — both the Shakespearian fairy, “deliverer of dreams,” and her thrash metal band, formed with her attractive but dimwitted lover, Mo. When Mo jilts her and calls his new band Queen Mab, Elfish is determined to keep the name for her own band and sets about getting revenge. To stop Mo, Elfish is obliged to steal, cheat, and lie to everyone around her. Happily, Elfish is a compulsive liar, and quite fond of cheating and stealing.
On the night Mo’s band is to play, he and his friends laugh cruelly around her. The people she has deceived turn on her viciously. It is up to Elfish whether to give up hope or to rally, proving to all the power of her will.
A fearless stage diver and shameless purveyor of bad sex, Elfish stands alone. Surrounded by people who have given up hope, only she will not put down her guitar. Only she refuses to stop dreaming.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The grubby demimonde of London's Brixton district serves as the backdrop for this low-rent rock-and-roll tale. Millar's treatment of Elfish, a self-absorbed, indifferently promiscuous, and hygienically challenged young woman engaged in a revenge quest against Mo, her former boyfriend and bandmate, whose penchant for promiscuity is as ripe as his sexual encounters are squalid, reads like a less refined Trainspotting. Elfish's machinations focus on naming her nascent thrash band after Queen Mab, the fairy queen and wish-granter of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Not coincidentally, Mo wants to use the same name for his new band, and he offers a deal: if Elfish can memorize Mercutio's 43-line soliloquy, he'll cede the name. Elfish's quest to get her way is rife with variegated but always shameless machinations, and Millar laces dry, droll humor throughout his depictions of his antiheroine's lies, manipulations, and unabashed self-regard. Elfish's lack of charm provides a wry, even satisfying twist that resolves many subplots and inadvertently gives this antifairy many of the same powers ascribed by the Bard to Queen Mab herself. (May)
