The imaginative flights, artistic struggles, and untimely deaths of some brilliant Scots, from Sir Walter Scott to Alexander McQueen.
In grunge and tartan, sideshow and magic lantern, Scottish Lost Boys presents Scotland as place and Scotland as idea in the imaginative flights, artistic struggles, and untimely deaths of a singular skeleton leaf clan.
Clan mythologists James McPherson and the Sobieski Stuart brothers; childhood scalping-survivor Robert McGee; fashion suicide Alexander McQueen; wolf-hunter Ernest Thompson Seton; film actor Jon Whiteley and director Bill Douglas; Aleister Crowley, conjuring spirits on the banks of Loch Ness; “Wizards of the North” Michael Scot, Sir Walter Scott, and John Henry Anderson; fantasy novelist George MacDonald: all these brilliant boys, wrapped in tartans of the imagination, encountered lostness as a betrayal of self or misguided acts of misadventure that fueled their art and identities.
These Scottish Lost Boys are Wild West protagonists, 1700s literary stars, shadow skin cutters, and cinematic murderers, all interwoven with J. M. Barrie's themes of lostness, immortality, and myth within a Scottish context—the afterlife of fairy, skin, and shadow.
