Pink steam rises from the vats of melting goo in the Vincent Price 3-D horror classic, House of Wax. Railroad buffs know "pink steam" as the first blast from a newly christened steam engine, which appears pink as it spews out rust. And now Pink Steam, the book, reveals the intimate secrets of Dodie Bellamy's life—sex, shoplifting, voyeurism, writing.

Like L. Frank Baum's Dorothy, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Bellamy grows up in a dreary Midwestern town. She's a bossy, queer child who identifies with the freaks she watches on The Twilight Zone. Her father's a carpenter obsessed with Kipling's The Jungle Book—the only book he's ever read. Her mother is a pragmatist who longs for a normal daughter. Eventually Bellamy hurls out of Indiana and tumbles into Oz—San Francisco's bohemian Mission District. As she attempts to reconcile her working class origins with the privileged insanity of her arts community, everything crackles and blurs. True confession bleeds into high theory into trash cinema (soundtrack provided by David Bowie and Oliver Messiaen). Kathy Acker, Diane Arbus, and Bernadette Mayer are the fates who guide Bellamy as she searches for a voice in a whirlwind of sizzling images and strange encounters. In this world a woman can turn into a giant reptile, fuck a demon, lust for King Kong—and still feel repressed, constricted. As she battles on the frontiers of überfemale vision, Bellamy tries on genre after genre—horror tale, essay, letter, academic novel, the fortune cookie tags of daily life. But, like off-the-rack clothing, no form fits exactly right. Pink Steam barges beyond the clichés of gendered experience. Unafraid of the personal, unabashed by politics and sex, Bellamy makes confusion her OK Corral. "When the legend is greater than the truth, print the legend." Dodie Bellamy is the girl who shot Liberty Valance.

Excerpts:

read Spew Forth here
read Barbie's Dream House and You Edju here

Dodie Bellamy's book Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons) won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. University of Wisconsin Press is reprinting her infamous epistolary vampire novel, The Letters of Mina Harker. She lives in San Francisco with the writer Kevin Killian and Blanche the cat.