The Ghastly One, a bio of exploitation filmmaker/filth merchant Andy Milligan by onetime Best Show interviewee Jimmy McDonough. I almost certainly wouldn't have touched this if it weren't that McDonough wrote the best rock bio ever: Shakey, about Neil Young. I find some of those Z-grade, Incredibly Strange Movies fun, but I hate a lot of them for their misogyny and their appeal to people's stupidity and cruelty (take Herschell Gordon Lewis, please), and this Milligan character wasn't exactly Art Carney's Ed Norton, likeability-wise. I've never seen any of his movies and even after finishing the book don't much care if I ever do. And yet, this is a really great biography--of a creep, but a complicated creep full of contradictions. McDonough knew him, and while it's not easy to say why he liked him so much, he does make the case that he was a driven artist, with a singular bleak and angry vision that he would have found a way to express even if he hadn't been working in a genre that permitted, indeed required, rough sex and cheezy gorefests. After witnessing his friend's decline and death, of AIDS, McDonough begins contacting relatives, and a family background of dark secrets opens up that recalls devastating documentaries like Crumb or Capturing the Friedmans, and I'll be damned if the creep doesn't begin to seem like some kind of tragic monster. Jimmy McDonough is a great biographer, and he took here a distinctly unpromising subject (unlike with Shakey) and turned out a resonant and haunting book.