Published in 2004
256 pages
Sonja Ahlers is a self-taught visual artist and writer. Her work is a blend of the artist book and zine, a pioneer of what could be called the highbrow zine, a writing style pertinent to the West Coast underground. She shows visual work regularly, running the gamut of public spaces. Her work is also published in magazines and anthologies.
What is this book about?
Riddled with tales of obsession, drugs, rock and roll, copy cats and scapegoats, Fatal Distraction is a play on Fatal Attraction, a Hollywood movie from the mid-eighties about female obsession and gender stereotypes. With explorations into how some of us distract ourselves from the horrors of the world and our very own lives, the dark themes in the novel are tempered by naïveté and a dry, subtle humour sometimes disguised by lovely images of totem creatures and pretty girls. In a 250-odd-page graphic novel, Ahlers’stories are told in shades and fleeting micro images. Combining fragments of text, drawing and collage, Fatal Distraction, the follow-up to the groundbreaking Temper, Temper (Insomniac Press, 1998), is a truthful, disrupted narrative which fuses the worlds of literature and art.
