This fluffy little bit of mid-90s ephemera was everything I had hoped it would be, and not a bit more.  As you might expect, it chronicles the life of Kurt Cobain, grunge rock's figure head, and (here in Washington) Local Boy Hits It Big.  Despite the often sensational writing style and the cover's promise of tabloid treats inside ("16 pages of dramatic photographs" proved out to be not so much "dramatic" as "repetitive and mostly from the Seattle Center memorial"), Thompson takes the middle road when describing Cobain's life.

A more easily swayed author may have made more hay from Cobain's notorious homeless period in Aberdeen.  He slept under a bridge, you know!  But as Thompson points out, he didn't sleep under a bridge for very long, his mother floated him a rental apartment for a while, he couch surfed at a lot of friends' houses, and even lived with various family members.  In other words, things are always more complicated than they seem.

I was intrigued that Thompson portrayed Cobain's death in a straight ahead fashion, never even entertaining the idea that it might not have been a suicide.  In fact, a lot of people had fairly good grounds at the time for requesting further inquiry into his death.  Although most people now accept that Cobain committed suicide, there is still a persistent underground conspiracy theory that Courtney killed Kurt (and I suspect no amount of evidence to the contrary could sway them).

I can understand if Thompson didn't want to sully Cobain's death.  But I'm surprised he didn't even mention alternate theories.  (I mean, have you seen Kurt's suicide note?  How anyone could look at it and not think "that's a Dear John letter with two random sentences tacked on at the bottom later to make it look like a suicide" is beyond me.)

Thompson is an accomplished rock biographer, with more than 100 books under his belt.  Which surprised me a little, because the quality of the writing is sometimes pretty uneven.  Some of Thompson's metaphors are so tortured and confused that they lose all meaning, as when Courtney "fit the role model like a glove, then clasped it to her bosom."   Others approach the level of spoonerism genius, like "Pop historians were swift to dig into the archives and unearth other occasions where lightning struck gold."  Lightning struck gold!  That's not a thing, but it totally should be!

Much of the book is written in a hard-boiled detective style, not unlike the script for an E! True Crime Story.  My favorite example of this is "His fame was simply the arsenic-tainted icing on a very rotten cake."

Combined with the occasional intrusion of the exclamation point into the authorial voice, and you have yourself a winner!

Overall, this is a lightweight bit of tabloid titillation, written in a colorful and appealing style, but still keeping a remarkably sane head on its shoulders regarding the various Cobain-related rumors and half truths which continue to swirl in his wake.  An excellent read for a lazy weekend afternoon!