To anyone who's ever wondered what went on in the 1990s' most notorious nightclubs, Village Voice
reporter Owen has a highly engaging answer. He weaves together three strands of masterful reporting, focusing on Peter Gatien, the nightclub impresario who owned Limelight and the Tunnel in Manhattan; Chris Paciello, the gangster who started Miami Beach's Liquid; and "club kid king" Michael Alig, the party promoter and Gatien employee who murdered his friend Angel Melendez. Alig's drug-addled story is the most grotesque and chilling: a few weeks before he hacked off the legs of his dead friend, he had thrown a "Blood Feast" party in which some guests "came covered in raw liver and slabs of beef." The author has apparently settled down now; "life is too precious to waste spending your time lurking around VIP rooms and getting high." At one time, though, he was a true believer in clubs and raves "as perfect but temporary democracies of desire," and is saddened by the crime that came to surround them. He has a distinctive writing style, recklessly mixing metaphors—one woman is "the proverbial tough cookie laced with arsenic straight from the pages of a hard-boiled novel"—and packing his chapters with noirish "wise guys" and "feds." It's a treat for fans of true crime, but armchair party animals will also appreciate the lengths to which this reporter goes—the book opens with Owen seeking, buying and tripping on the drug ketamine. Agent, Todd Shuster. (May)
Forecast:This book will appeal to fans of mobster lore, celebrity DJs and drug culture. Both James St. James's 1999 book
Disco Bloodbath and this year's film
Party Monster, starring Macauley Culkin, treat Michael Alig, the character who takes up about a third of
Clubland. Neither were mega-hits, but the story has a solid niche audience.
