Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving

Book excerpt: Elfish and four others squat in a crumbling three-story house in the run-down Brixton section of London. Years of such housing complement her hand-to-mouth lifestyle of hangovers, metal music, and failed ambitions; but when ex-boyfriend and ex-band mate Mo forms a new band with the old group's name, Queen Mab, Elfish feels compelled to reclaim the name for her own, as yet nonexistent, band to play her own music. Struggling for visibility and success in the local club scene, she turns to stage diving that is, forcing herself through onlookers, achieving the stage while the musicians are still performing, and drunkenly leaping into the audience, thereby entering the transcendental state of the dedicated stage diver. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do, and the life that results, in which chronic depression and bad outcomes are assumed, may leave few unmoved. Fair warning, though: filth, bodily fluids, and vomit mix freely with sex and substance abuse in Millar's 1994 opus, here receiving U.S. publication these many years later.