The Good Inn

“A book based on a soundtrack score that has not yet been composed for a feature film that does not yet exist.”

Pixies frontman Black Francis has approached writing his first book as he would do a song: with inventiveness and originality. The Good Inn tells the story of an eighteen-year-old known only as Soldier Boy who, after escaping a devastating explosion at the French port of Toulon, sets out on a bizarre journey across France.

Navigating his way past homicidal gypsies, combative soldiers and porn-peddling peasants, he takes refuge at The Good Inn – and promptly finds himself centre stage in the making of the world’s first narrative pornographic movie. Unique and vividly imagined, The Good Inn is a touchingly comic story that brings turn-of-the-century France to life.

From legendary Pixies front man, Black Francis, in collaboration with writer Josh Frank and renowned illustrator Steven Appleby, comes The Good Inn, a bold and visually arresting novel about art, conflict, and the origins of a certain type of cinema

In 1907, the French battleship Iéna was destroyed when a nitrocellulose-based weapon propellant it was carrying became unstable with age and self-ignited, killing 120 people. A year later, La Bonne Auberge became the earliest-known pornographic film, depicting an intimate encounter between a French soldier and an innkeeper's daughter. Like all films at the time, and for decades afterward, it was made with a highly combustible nitrocellulose-based film stock.

Loosely based on historical events, The Good Inn follows the lone survivor of the Iéna explosion as he makes his way through the French countryside. He falls into a strange love affair with an innkeeper's daughter and, even more deeply, into a volatile counteruniverse where war and art exist side by side.

But The Good Inn is also the very real story of the people who made the world's first stag film, and Francis weaves together real historical facts to re-create this lost piece of history, as seen through the eyes of a shell-shocked soldier who finds himself that film's subject and star. Through his journey we explore the power of memory, the simultaneously destructive and restorative power of light, and how the early pioneers of pornography helped shape the film industry for generations to come.