Caligula would have blushed

Lydia Lunch's Paradoxia is a voyeur's delight, consisting of shocking stories from Lunch's history as a Magellan of sexual exploration. The tales, purportedly from her past and one hopes at least partially embellished, are varied and would give the editors at Penthouse pause.

The book is subtitled "A Predator's Diary," and this isn't exactly true. The classic vision of predator is a killer that hunts on weak victims. In her case, the appropriate image is the T-Rex battle of Jackson's King Kong. Lunch styles herself as essentially male in her aggressive, conquering sexuality and she tends to form with relationships with people as aggressive as herself. The results are often unpleasant. When she does get busy with the weak, she takes an almost mothering approach. Although she says that she always leans toward the bad side, this means the socially out of bounds, rather than the evil.

Lunch's prose is often appealing clear and unadorned. When describing sex, she gets appropriately over-heated, but she occasionally gets overblown when describing the mundane day to day of life on the fringes.