Malingering

The Goth subculture that flourished in the 1980s and '90s is experiencing a long overdue resurgence of interest, so the time is definitely ripe to rediscover Susan Compo’s short stories, hailed at the time as “like Raymond Carver through Goth-coloured glasses” (Sunday Times).

Compo was immersed in the music and fashion scenes in London and Los Angeles during those years - as participant and keen observer - and she writes about them with wit and compassion but also brutal honesty, capturing in her fiction the exhilaration and the despair of the times, the desires and foibles of its protagonists.

What makes her stories exceptional, though, is the way the surface reality they detail so sharply is shot through with a curious dyed-black magic: a daylight-shunning bedsit dweller is visited by a mysterious lover whose angel wings keep getting in the way; a pizza-delivery boy is waylaid, Gulliver-like, by tiny ghosts who literally stitch him up; a foursome out clubbing are abruptly transmuted into Ken and Barbie dolls, missing their most precious parts . . .