One thing is for certain -- you won't forget reading Alan Moore's and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls. Just in case you don't know, this lovely bit of erotica was a continued story (strict eight-page installments) in the pages of Taboo and elsewhere. It was completed and collected by Top Shelf and the volume I read was the expanded edition from Knockabout. Before commenting on the story itself, let me applaud Melinda Gebbie on some of the prettiest comic artwork I've ever seen. She works in a soft pastel style well suited to this material and that is often contrasted with other images supposedly from lurid tales which our characters draw inspiration from. Who are those girls? No less than Alice of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Wendy from Peter Pan and Dorothy from The Wizard of OZ. They are grown women in this story which reveals to us the somewhat sordid "truth" behind those children's classics.
Book One introduces us to the women. Alice is an older lady who has been shuttled over to Austria to hide her lesbian sexual appetites from polite British society. She takes up residence in Monsieur Roget's hotel where he has arranged for it to be the setting for sexual escapades of all kinds. Each room is supplied with The White Book which has counterfeit erotica in it to inspire the guests. Dorothy is a young woman fresh from America who is sexually adventurous. Wendy is a married woman to a man much older than herself and she is rather repressed by her husband and society's expectations in general. By the end of the first Book the three women have become friends and tentative lovers, at least in the case of Wendy. Alice and Dorothy are not timid.
Book Two showcases how the three women continue to explore their sexual fantasies with one another and the hotel staff when available. As they share one another physically, led by Lady Alice, they also tell their stories which are cast in terms similar to the famous episodes from the children's stories they all star in. We discover that Alice was interfered with when she was young and her later inclinations to lesbian behavior were encouraged and later preyed on by her older tutor, and who is married to a rich man oblivious to his wife's wanton ways. Drugs become a part of her sexual experiences. Dorothy is a randy young woman isolated on a farm who finds she enjoys sex and opens herself up to the hands on her "Uncle's" farm who it turns our come to resemble a famous scarecrow, lion and metal woodsman. Wendy and her brothers find a young male prostitute named Peter who introduces them to sexual pleasures on summer in the hidden manicured woods of a local park. We encounter these stories blended together and peppered with great deal of explicit sexual activity.
Book Three tells us what happens after the assassination of Duke Ferdinand. The rumors of war cause the hotel to clear out and for a time it allows those who are interested in becoming more open with their sexual escapades a grand opportunity to do so. The three women are now far along in their storytelling and the darker aspects of their tales begin to emerge. The lightness of the earlier pages suggested darker secrets and now we learn them, though the revelations prove to be a boon to the three women who are the last to leave the hotel just a day or two before troops arrive to destroy it. The shadows of war wipe away the innocence which was never innocence, but neither was it the horror of death and utter destruction, the inevitable legacy of war.
This book is not for the faint of heart. The images are at once exceedingly graphic as is Moore's dialogue. But likewise, they are eloquent and even charming. I've long wanted to read Lost Girls, fascinated by the notion that these three children's book icons would be treated in a new way. To prepare I read both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well as Peter Pan and The Wizard of OZ. While I knew the stories well enough, I suppose, I'd never actually read the actual texts before in all my many years on this planet. At the very least Lost Girls pushed me to fill that gap in my learning. Without that understanding Lost Girls might disintegrate into just some pretty pornographic images, but the book is much more than that.
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