Title: Red Light: Superheroes, Saints, and Sluts Author: Anna Camioleri, editor Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press Publish Date: 2005 Pages: 192 Genres:: Fiction, Compilation Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

The verbal landscape of Red Light: Superheroes, Saints, and Sluts is by turns funny, passionate, tender, rage-drenched and heartbreaking. From the story of a salon receptionist with a social conscience to a poem paying tribute to a female pancake syrup icon, Superheroes Saints, and Sluts is a fine collection of the difficulties of growing up sexual, neglected, human, and conscious. A wide expanse of psychological, ethnic, and social ground is covered here. One author’s tale of sexual experimentation with her friend in the bathtub while appearing to be only playing with Barbie dolls together gives way to an illustrated poem about a woman who kills a priest to avenge an unclarified crime. Women on the margins of society come to and become a rich center here, be they strippers, murderesses, or the near-terminally lonely.

This compilation is a human nature walk through desire, tenderness, rage, resignation and survival, punctuating just how much it can sometimes hurt to be exactly who you are. One college student recalls the frustration of having to live up to an expectation of strength based on her appearance and the preconceived notions of a vapid college professor. Biblical figures and a princess from Greek mythology hang out at a bar commiserating and complaining about their significant others in a kind of alchemization of  the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” painting from image to word back to image. The Bible as allegory crops up again in a story about a first lesbian love and once more a modern-day rendering of Lillith’s relationship with and eventual estrangement from Adam. Brilliant what-if scenarios of the Virgin Mary as a Toronto single mother seeking child support from God to dream sequences of Marilyn Monroe as one writer’s lover are startling and gripping.

After a few pages, my brain was fairly buzzing from this soul tour and the intense jousting of conflicting emotions that collide throughout the book. You’ll find odes to celebrities as mentioned above, a desire to understand them, a desire to be like them, and a desire to be desired and loved by them. Sketches and illustrations accompany some of the writing.

This collection is passionate, spanning different corners of the globe and different states of mind fluidly. History is pulled forward in time to splash into the present. Talk about talent to burn. If you read this one while taking public transportation, be sure not to miss your stop.