Hideous Beauties

HIDEOUS BEAUTIES is a collection of a dozen outrageous fictions, each based on a photograph, painting, sketch, collage, or assemblage by an equally outrageous artist (Hans Bellmer, Ed Kienholz, Joel-Peter Witkin, et alia), that explores the amphibious edge where language and image splice. Death is a village of mermaids, suburbia a hunchbacked dwarf at the door who just won't go away, identity a self that can't stop cleaving, millennial sex a radical form of digestion. In other words, Lance Olsen is at it again, and with a vengeance, inviting us into his absurd, unsettling, tender, and formally disruptive fever-dream worlds so that we might wake up, and wake up changed.