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Amos Lassen wrote on 02/26/2011:

Horsley, Sebastian, “Dandy in the Underworld”, Harper Perennial, 2008.
“ A Masterpiece of Filth”
Amos Lassen
Brian Ferry has called Sebastian Horsely’s “Dandy in the Underworld” a masterpiece of filth and that it is, Yet the filth is well written and very, very interesting. It is funny, strange and somewhat upsetting in its perversity,
The underlying idea of Horsley is to take one’s lifestyle and raise it to uselessness. Horsely seems doomed from the start, His parents were both ridiculous and terrible. They abused each other, they drank, and they divorced and married other people. Because his mother fell in love with the concept of suicide, Sebastian was sent off to boarding school and there he founded a punk band and discovered drugs and sex. After he finished boarding school, he enrolled in art school, had a bad marriage and became friends with a convicted murderer. He had sex with everyone as he yearned for attention. Then there were the prostitutes on whom he says he spent one hundred pounds sterling and another one hundred thousand on crack. And heroin also enters the picture and he ended up in rehab but learns that his self-creation was little more than an act of revenge against his father.
Sebastian discovers how to become self-aware and begins to hate the body he has destroyed through drugs but always loves money because of the power that it brings. He also falls in love with himself and goes as far as to state that having a girlfriend would cause him to be unfaithful to himself.
In a strange turn of events, Horsely went to the Philippines where he was crucified and thereby became infamous in London, His crucifixion, he claims, was an artistic statement and an attempt to break the limits of life. There are few words to describe Sebastian Horsely. He was an artist and a junkie, a misogynist, a narcissist, a bon vivant and a sexual deviant. He is now nearly bankrupt having wasted his family’s fortune on “pleasure” and he had a very strange life. In the style of Quentin Crisp, George Gordon, Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde, he was a “dandy”.