Cult Fiction, Pulp Nonfiction

Collage artist and proprietor of the den of literary iniquity that is Koma Books (formerly Amok Books), Dan Wininger is the closest thing Los Angeles arts and culture has to a living laser. For more than a decade, his satanically heroic energy has turned on the innocent droves to new worlds and new words — from the cheery mutilated-baby art of Trevor Brown, to the collected works of urban author Donald Goines, to Charles Platt’s 1968 sexual fantasy The Gas, a novel about a nerve agent that envelops London in an orgy of sex-soaked murder and incest. After he’d built up a faithful clientele that includes Marilyn Manson, Courtney Love and Genesis P-Orridge, Wininger escaped the hipster tsunami that engulfed Vermont Avenue in the mid-1990s, moving Koma briefly to a once-stately downtown Los Angeles office building and then a bit further west. He now splits space with like-minded Creation Books, eschewing all things that might make him exclaim, as he once did about the speeding ticket this writer received for trying to get there before close, “How boring!” 1228 W. Seventh St., downtown, (213) 623-6995.