Strange Angels by Andy Bull contd Reviewed by Steve Rudd

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I suppose that it's quite a weird thing for Andy Bull to have done in the first place: going round and effectively chasing death in such a manner. But Strange Angels succeeds in showing that there are a great many people who are totally fixated by these idols and who have since devoted their own lives to preserving their memories for future generations. The most exciting journeys that Andy makes are in search of the ghost of Marilyn, as he starts out in LA before heading to the desert and the lure of Las Vegas.

From the insanity of Vegas (where you could probably marry your dog. Or a pizza, as long as the pizza was fourteen years old and the judge at the court-house thought it was mature enough for such a big step) he heads North through the beautifully arid state of Nevada to Reno, a place that became very famous indeed on the back of the movie The Misfits (one of Marilyn's most famous films) that was shot in and around the Reno area.

The road to Reno was perfection: 481 miles of lonesome highway threading through a desolate landscape, up through the Mojave and on to the Great Basin desert, through a landscape littered with decaying gold- and silver-mining towns, dried up lakes and rivers that run to nowhere, just giving up and disappearing amid the dry scrub. This is the last, vast, rugged and remote wild country in the USA. Aside from investigating into the enduring appeal of Marilyn, Elvis, James Dean and JFK, there are also a number of excursions that take in the area around a place called Jonesboro in Georgia - the fictional setting of Margaret Mitchell's epic Gone With The Wind novel... which is, allegedly, the best-selling novel of all time.

Despite it being a work of fiction, that doesn't stop thousands of people visiting Jonesboro every year in order to try and capture the essence of the people and the places depicted in the grand story.

Andy also heads north into Wisconsin and to the area in which notorious murderer Ed Gein lived... and where he grave-robbed and carried out dastardly acts of evil so as to inspire both the Psycho and The Silence of The Lambs works of fiction that imitated such gruesome fact. Given the subject matter you might be wondering how this book can't be totally depressing, but it isn't. Sure, the insight into Ed Gein's life is graphically disturbing and might want to be skipped, but on the whole this book is truly fascinating. Face it, we are all interested in death at the end of the day.

And when superstars who are known and loved the world over die young, an obsession with the faithful departed can quite clearly transpire with relative ease - even in the most ordinary of down-to-earth folk. ISBN 0-552-99572-X (first published in 1995 by Black Swan)

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