Review
It's 1995. The book opens with the author, a journalist with the Village Voice, snorting the animal anaesthetic ketamine in the Limelight Club, New York. Ketamine is dangerous: it causes brain lesions, and turns people into anti-social zombies hooked on psychotic inner experiences. But that is precisely what New York clubbers were after - the experience to end all experience. From the love and peace ethos of the late '80s, early '90s clubland had moved on to a fascination with scary trips and weird scenarios resembling a pagan party scene in an X-rated Hollywood biblical epic. Clubland soon became gangland, with huge quantities of ecstasy and other psychosomimetics dealt to willing punters. The stories of rich and corrupt club owners like crack addict Peter Gatien and Michael Alig make for a depressing if sickly absorbing read, as the book plunges into the murky world of transvestite police informers, surveillance, narcotics distribution, mafia subculture and protectionism, and club rivalry. The Limelight, Tunnel and Palladium were the elite among NY's underground community, run by coked-up and amoral men totally estranged from normal life. These clubs catered for three groups: the 'hardcore' homosexuals; those pierced and radical in dress and hair colour; and the arts and entertainment fraternity. These were people throwing themselves into hell and wanting it, a hell where stomach pumps were the new fashion accessory and joyless eroticism played out to sickening excess was the norm. Alig's drug habit saw him commit a gruesome murder and disposal of the body. As you might expect, the bubble bursts, with police raids, jail terms and bankruptcy. Highly readable in a shivery way, not for the fainthearted or easily shocked, this book, like the New York clubland it describes so well, is explicit and unpleasantly fascinating. (Kirkus UK)
Bang
by Rusty Young
by Thomas A. Reppetto
