Ken Hollings – författare

Using the expansive pop poetry of Japanese monster movies, Destroy All Monsters offers a darkly ironic retelling of recent events, as America slides into war in the Middle East.Muri, a Japanese android, is befriended by Yena and Mai, two American girls on the loose in Tokyo's red-light district. In a world of experimental drug dealers, gangsters and professional sex workers the girls find themselves on the run from sinister forces as giant reptiles descend on Japan.With aliens taking over the White House, Elvis returned from the dead, and a small telepathic dog, this is not your average read, but then you're not an average reader, are you?

A journey deep into the heart of the trash experience: tales from the underground and exploitation movie scene in America during the 1960s.

Trash has always served me well—over the years it has become the outer form and material expression of my dreams: of tomorrow, of life in space, of the blissful alienation from this world that I have always craved.—from Inferno

So begins the first part of this personal inquiry into the world of trash by writer and theorist Ken Hollings. Why do we find ourselves so attracted to the cheap and vulgar, the discarded, the misshapen and the abject? What do we really mean when we say that something is “so bad it's good,” and what finally does it say about us? Part personal confession and part historical roadmap of tales from the underground and exploitation movie scene in America during the 1960s, Inferno takes the reader on a journey deep into the heart of the trash experience.

With Inferno, Hollings offers a complex and intricate timeline of connections, coincidences, and resonances that have mostly gone unnoticed. He traces the transmission of “the Purple Death,” a deadly and exotic virus first depicted in an old episode of a Flash Gordon movie serial, through the films of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and Kenneth Anger and into the output of such exploitation pioneers as Ray Dennis Steckler, Hershel Gordon Lewis, and Russ Meyer. Hollings also turns his idiosyncratic gaze upon key aspects of teenage culture during the 1960s, including hot rods, “Rat Fink,” surfers, bikers, and beach parties, uncovering a secretive and hidden universe of masks, fake identities, and secret desires. Even Dante would think twice about taking this trip into Hell.

The third and final volume of Ken Hollings’ personal reflections on Trash Aesthetics.In Paradise, Hollings tells the story of three kings who squandered everything they had in a grandiose spectacle of waste. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, "King of Rock 'n' Roll" Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop," all shared the same doomed innocence. Their lives and early deaths were connected through individual displays of unfettered extravagance that brought them to the very edge of ruin. Each of them lived out their personal ideals of beauty and pleasure—even after the money was gone. In his reworking of Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, Hollings presents Heaven as a place of rebellious, but tragic, self-indulgence. As he notes in his introduction: "You have to be in Heaven to see Hell."