Original Edition
The cult pulp Pure Mania is back in its original form.
‘Let us not forget, ladies and gentlemen,’ Chickenfeed announced as Christine mounted her man, ‘that fiction has played an important role in the development of Western sexuality. Among other things, the terms Sadism and Masochism are derived from the names of men who wrote pornographic novels.’
Pure Mania is set in an almost fictional anarcho-punk milieu around the squats and council estates of East London. This trashy adventure story takes the form of a blatantly falsified tour of eighties youth trends. It's a pastiche of the fiction published by New English Library during the 1970's.
Situationist fun and anarcho-punk adventure à la Jamie Reid meets Cockney Red street violence, Pure Mania by Stewart Home was first published by Polygon Books in 1989.
MARX CHRIST AND SATAN UNITED IN STRUGGLE
Pure Mania is a pulp cult set in London's punk sort and skinhead scene all of them ready ready to blow the British Isles or at least the arts and media establishment to hell.
SEXUAL PERVERSION AT ITS VERY WORST
Tracy is a militant vegan who is willing to sacrifice everything to save the third world. And in order to get her Paul gives up coffee and other women and Edward gives up his Nazi uniform and other men.
¡ SEX AND ECO-TERRORISME !
PURE MANIA IN Hardback 9781914090660 / Original paperback 9781914090776 / and quality eBook 9781914090943
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Pure Mania by unknown author
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Given that copies of the cult pulp novel PURE MANIA now go for over £40 at least on Abe Books and other collector, second hand and rare book websites, it was about time somebody released a popularly priced version of this street favourite, allowing sorts of reduced means to be able to get a copy.
This new issue of the novel, 34 years after the First Edition is titled 'ORIGINAL' which is partly confusing, although more confusing to the algorithm than it is to readers. This is in fact the original version and vision of the novel, although it is the exact same text as the 34 year old First Edition - - minus a few typos here and there.
PURE MANIA has been printed at last in a supercheap street and popularly priced format so that everyone can read it and not have to shell out nearly fifty quid to get a copy from some collector somewhere! This will only in fact raise the values of those collectible 1989 editions online of course, but this is about you and me simply getting our hands on this amazing text and enjoying it as it was always meant to have been enjoyed.
The 34 years that have passed have been unkind in some ways, although more generous in others. The music and publishing industries have become safer than ever as commodification becomes universal; politics has been through the blender post-Blair era centrism, and all art strikes have collapsed and the middle classes have cemented their stranglehold on arts bureaucracy and production wherever they can do so.
PURE MANIA emerges unscathed and is an amazing read, and for those not born when this book first came out, this is your chance now to see inside the political and aesthetic heart of the world that came before this one. Vegan terror was real! Street sorts and teenage mayhem was real! And finally the complexities of the London punk scene and the music industry's fast moving destruction of art through greed and art's destruction of the music industry through violence - - both real too!
So don't shell out fifty quid to read this corker! Get it at last at a proper and popularly Poplar-priced Stewart Home street price and let your jaw drop to the ultra-pulp sex, music and violence that is PURE MANIA by STEWART HOME.
A molotov cocktail of a novel. A switchback ride through an over amplified London lowlife of punch-ups, fast fucks and media hype. Pure Mania is the stuff of which cults are made - Time Out