Description

Luci LaBang is a star: for decades this flamboyant drag artist has cast a spell over screen and stage. Now she’s the leading lady in a smash hit pantomime.

When Luci’s co-star meets with a mysterious accident, a new ingenue shimmers onto the scene, and Luci is immediately smitten with the fantastically beautiful Luda and her sinister charm.

Luda begs Luci to share the secrets of her stardom and to reveal the hidden tricks of her trade. For Luci LaBang is a mistress of the Glamour, an arcane discipline that draws on sex, drugs, and the occult for its trancelike, transformative effects.

But as Luci tutors her young protegee, their fellow actors and crew members begin meeting with untimely ends. Now Luci wonders if Luda has mastered the Glamour all too well.

What follows is an intoxicating descent into the demimonde of Gasglow, a fantastical city of dreams, and into the nightmarish heart of Luda herself: a femme fatale, a phenomenon, a monster, and, perhaps, the brightest star of them all.

Publisher Review

“An impeccably realised phantasmagoric plunge into an alternate Glasgow, a cocktail shaker of magic, hilarity, and gender dissolving madness.” * Frankie Boyle * “If Sontag’s notion of camp became a religion this would be a seminal text. A glorious exploration of the borderlands of identity, gender and lippy. Loved it.” * Denise Mina * Financial Times’ Best Books of 2023

“A story about magic, pantomime, pretence and desire, told in a head-spinning helter-skelter of allusive prose and surreal imagery.” * Financial Times * “Unique and captivating.” * The Independent * “Luda, like drag, is many things. If you want four hundred pages of wild sprawling, fabulous not drabulous fun, then you’ll want Luda.” * Glasgow Review of Books * “A drag queen’s hallucinatory journey through a hyperreal version of Glasgow is extremely arch – and a lot of fun.” * The Guardian * “Grant Morrison might well be best known as a leading comics writer…. However, their talent for sparky dialogue and spiky, exciting characters is delightfully apparent in their novels too, giving the prose an unusually arresting, eccentric tone. And the author’s gift for cinematic thrills and spills drives the narrative forward like a turbocharged Batmobile.” * The Big Issue * “A deliriously wild spell no other author could have conjured.” * The Bookseller’s Scotland Focus Editor’s Choice * “A sensory onslaught, swirling with allusion and metaphor; a drug-;aced, sex-positive tsunami of words that it’s simpler to be swept along by than resist.” * Financial Times * “Grant Morrison is a modern mythmaker.” — Alex Segura, bestselling author of Secret Identity “Brilliant.” * LA Times * “Morrison is a skilled word magician.” * Publishers Weekly * “If such a thing as drag literature exists, the sort of book that Divine is reading in heaven, Luda belongs at the top of the heap.” * Nylon * “This book talks to you, to itself, to being, to flowing identities, and to everything from H.P. Lovecraft, makeup, and Max Ernst to Batman comics, aging, and Freud. Many books you read; Luda is a book you experience..” * NPR *