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"Magnificent Corpses"
A guide to saints' relics in Europe should satisfy the most grisly-minded readers.
By Frank Browning
[08/05/99]

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"My Father, Dancing"
A debut collection of stories about fathers and daughters proves the author sovereign over a very small terrain.
By Adam Kirsch
[08/04/99]

Ivory Tower
Biofunk
Are we becoming post-human or simply more in love with machines?
By Virginia Eubanks
[08/04/99]

Shelve it under unfiction
Requests for books on send, R and taxidermy were the easy questions during my first month at a bookstore info desk.
By Andrea Siegel
[08/03/99]

Reviews
"The Big Con"
Six decades after its original publication, an investigation of larceny stakes its claim as an American classic.
By Steve McQuiddy
[08/03/99]

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August 5, 1999 | When I was in seventh grade, my best (and oldest) friend Steve did a book report on "The Exorcist." Fashioning a Linda Blair puppet out of an old Paul McCartney bubble bath container, Steve staged the book's big exorcism scene. The topper came when, out of a tiny tube Steve had attached to the doll, it vomited green goop he'd concocted out of flour, water and food coloring. His classmates were suitably grossed out, and the teacher, suitably amused and impressed, not only gave him an A-plus, she had him repeat the performance for her students the following year to show them what an A-plus book report looked like.

If Steve and I were in school today, it's very likely that same book report would get him pegged as a potential time bomb; that school officials would recommend counseling; that I, along with his other friends, would be asked to reveal what we talked about when we were alone with him; that his parents would be contacted about the suitability of what they let their son read and watch; that any teacher who praised Steve's report would, at the very least, be reprimanded for giving their approval to potentially damaging material; that the parents of other kids would protest that their children had been exposed to this display; and that Steve, for the rest of his years in the public school system, would be regarded as if he were a rabid lab rat who showed signs of wanting to chew through his cage. (God knows what would have happened to him if he had made his senior project today: It was a film about high-school life where, in one fantasy sequence played for laughs, a student shoots a teacher who bugs him. Now a successful commercial editor and happily married suburban homeowner, his favorite holiday is still Halloween.)

That's a paranoid scenario, but it's one that seems entirely in keeping with the sort of talk that has circulated since the Littleton shootings about the need to identify and monitor potentially troubled kids. And no group of teenagers have come under more scrutiny than the kids who've devoted themselves to living out a modern-day version of the Gothic sensibility. With their black clothes, make-up and attraction to daydreams of horror and decay, Goth kids have a knack for setting off alarm bells in conventional sensibilities. Combining a gloomy outlook with fashion that borrows from and combines elements of punk, metal and transgenderism, Goth kids could be voted by their high-school classmates Least Likely to Get With the Program. Tune in to any talk show hosted by Sally Jesse Raphael or Jenny Jones or Maury or Springer on the theme of "Troubled Teens" or "Make Over My Wild Child!" and you're sure to see a Goth kid or two among the assembled bad examples.

Next page | It's the "normal" kids who make life hell