"Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women is an inventively voiced Go Ask Alice for the millennium."
--author (Random House, Prentice Hall) and online columnist, Debra DeSalvo
--author (2.13.61 Press) Don Bajema
--author (Masquerade Press) Charles Gatewood
---"Singer" in Gwar, Oderus Urungus
Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women is 89,000 words of taut, steady fiction centered mostly in the underground rock world of San Francisco. The book would appeal to fans of Tom Robbins, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, and Jim Carroll. The angle is unique, however; one-third of the story was written while I was using drugs. The remainder of the writing, and all of the editing, occurred during the last three years of drug-free living. This mixture lends a credible attraction as well as a shimmering clarity to the adventures.
The cover painting for was done specifically for the book by controversial outlaw artist and cultural icon R.K. Sloane (Guns N' Roses, Zippo Lighters.)
Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women is poetic, pornographic, and spiritual. It chronicles the adventures of independent pop legend, Cash Newmann, in his pursuit of and musings around God, sex, drugs, and purpose. Cash is good-looking, smart, talented and basically kind, but a little bit evil. He is a very believable character. Several short selections from the book have already been published on the internet in literary magazines. The following publications have printed excerpts, and all have asked me to become a regular contributor:
Yardbird Press: http://www.yardbird.com/deanstorydec97.htm
UXU magazine: ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/UXU/uxu-394.txt
Pugzine
http://www.pugzine.com/pug2/rant2.html
My home page has received an extra 20-30 hits per day as a result of links from these publications. E-mail has ranged from fan-like devotion to abject hatred.
The protagonist was culled from my experiences, observations and imagination. I am a 34 year-old musician, clean and sober for 4 years. As the singer in the rock group, cat, I was a recording artist on Warner Brothers with a loyal cult following. I toured the dives of America and Europe, slept with everyone, drank anything, felt, saw and lapped life to the inside my skull, died a few times and lived to tell the tale.
Cash dies. After two hundred-and-fifty pages of very personal yet universal first-person narration, come two pages of a third-person account of the finding of Cash's body. I had to kill the character-- not out of any didactic need to evangelize, but merely to balance the reality of my drug-using past with the viewpoint of my substance-free present. Given the subplot of the dirty city worming its way into his spirit and tainting his very beautiful and very human soul, Cash's death is the end of a natural progression.
This book is different from others of the genre for several reasons:
The book neither condemns nor champions drugs.
It does not admonish, does not brag, and has no moral.
It is very honest.
It is based on the unique viewpoint of a person in recovery writing as a person on drugs.
This combination fuses the depravity of one extreme with the self-knowledge of another. Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women is a bedtime story for the jaded, fueled by an uncommon amazement with the ordinary.
When the protagonist dies, he is simply gone. Game over. I have had 44 friends die. I feel numbed and bewildered by this, but try to keep living and laughing and feeling. I have poured some of their stories, some of my stories and some of my obsessions into this book. It yields captivating results. As I said in a recent college-radio interview, "Everything that can be done, has been done. Being a great artist consists simply of being a great editor."s
I am open to touring, and I am willing to work very hard to promote this book.
Cheers,
Michael W. Dean
This document and the manuscript it describes are both Copyright 1997 Michael W. Dean
