Want to know what happens when masculinity goes horribly wrong? How big-hair metal and the ninteen-eighties brought about the premature demise of Simon Taylder esquire?
‘My sex-change hell’, ’My wife was a fella’, 'Blonde was a brickie', ‘Vicar slams sex-change freaks’, ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’.
Where would the tabloids and trashy daytime TV talk shows be without this titillating perennial, more properly known, of course, as ‘gender reassignment’? Neither tacky kiss ‘n’ tell memoir nor harrowing 'mis-lit' sob-story, 'Death by Eyeliner' is a dark, sometimes distubring account of a changing physical and emotional landscape; a tale of brutal revenge acted out upon the previous incumbent of Ms Lacey Taylder's surgically-altered body and set against the background of the gender-bending nineteen-eighties. It's an intimate insight into what really happens when Simon becomes Sian; when history repeats itself and life imitates art.
But the author's diatribe against her predecessor is thrown into confusion when she becomes a victim of sexual crime. Her attempts to cope with the ordeal, the police investigation and subsequent trial transform the narrative into an intensely personal account of self-destruction in which the ghost of Simon and her own capricious muse become unlikely enemies, hell-bent on undermining her delicate state of mind until the mysterious María Inés de la Cruz appears like an angel from heaven and plucks our heroine from impending oblivion.