Ed Lee is best known for spectacularly gruesome books like "The Bighead," or sick short stories like "Header." This little chapbook, entitled "Quest for Sex, Truth, and Reality" marks a significant departure for Lee. While the three stories included here still contain Lee's usual warped outlook on modern day society, the stories are much deeper than mere blood and guts tales. The three stories in this booklet are not easy to decipher, but in that respect they mirror our own individual search for truth and reality.

The first story, "Goddess of the New Dark Age," concerns a washed up writer dying of cancer and his attempt to seek the meaning of reality. He goes to the usual sources one would consider in such a quest, heading down to the university to talk to a philosophy professor. The professor gives him a long, academic rant that is neither illuminating nor coherent. The author turns to sex, finding nothing lurking there that reveals reality. Only when he recognizes that the reality of our time is horror heaped upon horror, the reality of man's cruelty and endless heartbreak, does he discover what is real.

Lee moves down darker trails in "The Seeker," a tale even more obscure than the previous story. A writer wonders into a strange town, encountering several weird people in a local bar while the army searches for something strange in the surrounding environs. A few stomach churning scenes later finds the writer encountering what the army is looking for. What it is and what it means is unclear, but the man discovers the object has bigger plans than corrupting the local townspeople. Lee writes that the symbolism of this story is that the things we seek out because we believe it is the truth often turn out to be something completely different.

"Pay Me" unavoidably deals with the quest for sex. In this pornographic yarn, a man named Smith runs across Lisa, an old school chum, in a seedy bar. She is even more attractive than he remembers, and the two make small talk over drinks for a time. Regrettably for Smith, he soon sees what her job is in this type of bar. The descriptions here are graphic in a tone that suggests certain magazines available only to those over eighteen. Smith and Lisa do spend the night together, resulting in Smith's incorporation into the stage show at the bar. Lee claims this story deals with the biggest fear of the 1980's, namely the shroud of sexual terror that descended over the country due to the AIDS virus.