Spork Press
36 pages, $12

Review by Emily-Jo Hopson

Saturn, by Simon Jacobs (of Safety Pin Review) is a brave oddity: a collection of 16 shorts about David Bowie, both semi-biographical and hyper-fictionalized. If the thought of reading a book of fan-fiction puts you off from picking it up, reconsider: It is a powerful, intelligent work, polished to the gleam in both theme and execution, at sentence and story level. Though Jacobs is clearly a Bowie fan, and Saturn is, by definition, fan-fiction, it is not a work of fan worship – the portrayal is affectionate, but not uncritical. It’s a fascinating, weird speculation on what life might perhaps be like in David Bowie Land, in David Bowie’s “sizable Manhattan apartment,” as the artist comes to the end of his multi-decade career. There are some accompanying illustrations, and these are equally honest; Bowie’s big teeth, jowls, stubble and age lines are all there.

Plot basics are open to interpretation. My reading: Having become “the ‘elder statesman’ of rock, an old man left to passively herald in the new as his voice goes reedy,” Jacobs’ Bowie is descending Mt. Olympus, and becoming mortal. He attempts to stave off the future and his mortality by revisiting and, increasingly, dwelling within his own iconography; purchased works of art begin to take on his features, flashes of Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke appear in stormy windowpanes, movie and video game cameos are re-watched, obscure bit-parts re-inhabited. Continue reading →