Horror Hospital Unplugged

Dennis Cooper

One has to wonder whether Cooper has the same morbid fascination for the movie *Horror Hospital* evidenced by others of my acquaintance. Why else would he name his wannabe-Nirvana characters after a relatively obscure (and not so relatively silly) British B movie from the seventies? This graphic-novel adaptation of a Cooper short story details the lives of four youths in a band called, not surprisingly, Horror Hospital. Their lead vocalist, Trevor Machine, seems to attract gay men wherever he goes (and comes out with Cooper's favorite line, "But I'm not gay.", as many times as a number of his other characters, despite its ringing just as false; it would almost be refreshing to meet a single Cooper character who's secure in his sexuality), resulting in failed relationships that Machine mines for his self-obsessed lyrics. Things get even weirder when David Geffen takes note of the band, and Machine is visited by the ghost of River Phoenix. Folks, you can't make this stuff up. Except that Dennis Cooper, in fact, has.

The book is drawn by usually-competent artist Keith Mayerson, and there are certain panels where his competence comes through; for the most part, though, it looks rather like Mayerson was drawing in control-freak-Ronald-Searle mode, but without Searle's particular eye for biting satire. Coupled with the usual Cooper ulta-postmodern disdain for plot linearity, the whole thing ends up coming off, more than anything else, as hard to read, and not in the good way other Cooper works (e.g., My Loose Thread) are hard to read.