HIDEOUS BEAUTIES is a collection of a dozen outrageous fictions, each basedon a photograph, painting, sketch, collage, or assemblage by an equallyoutrageous artist (Hans Bellmer, Ed Kienholz, Joel-Peter Witkin, et alia),that explores the amphibious edge where language and image splice.Death is a village of mermaids, suburbia a hunchbacked dwarf at the door whojust won't go away, identity a self that can't stop cleaving, millennial sexa radical form of digestion.In other words, Lance Olsen is at it again, and with a vengeance, invitingus into his absurd, unsettling, tender, and formally disruptive fever-dreamworlds so that we might wake up, and wake up changed.