Punk Elegies ― True Tales of Death Trip Kids, Wrongful Sex, and Trial by Angel Dust

Punk Elegies arrives like a chemically unstable mixture of Richard Yates and Damon Runyon. Set along Hollywood Boulevard at the birth of punk and the death of the 1970s, the thirty-three melancholic, comic laments of Punk Elegies are a mesmerizing concoction of delusion and revelation. A cultural moment, a marriage and one young man’s mind and soul spiral through a series of boundless possibilities and arrive at a harrowing finality. In the end, on the spin cycle of destiny, MacDonell circles alone, naked and bewildered in the labyrinth of a pre-AIDS bathhouse inferno. The first sunrise of the rest of his life dares him to step outside.

Allan MacDonell is the author of Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine and was a defining voice of the groundbreaking punk periodical Slash magazine. While writing for Slash, he also co-invented slam-dancing. MacDonell lives in Los Angeles.