Paradise

Paradise is the third and last volume of Ken Hollings' personal reflections on Trash Aesthetics. It tells the story of three kings who burned through everything they had in a grand spectacle of waste.

The three are King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Elvis Presley, the self-styled King of Rock 'n' Roll, and Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. They shared a doomed innocence. Their lives and early deaths were linked by displays of unrestrained extravagance that carried each of them to the edge of ruin, and each went on living by his own ideals of beauty and pleasure even after the money had run out.

Hollings reworks Dante's Paradiso and presents Heaven as a place of rebellious yet tragic self-indulgence. As he puts it in his introduction, you have to be in Heaven to see Hell.