Dead Elvis is not a journalistic book. It is, in a way, the antithesis of conventional journalism. Not a story, a chronicle, or a factual inquiry, it is a brooding, circuitous, idiosyncratic rumination from the other side of American life, the place where "serious" journalists rarely venture. Unwittingly, it serves as an eerie argument for journalism to take that other, sometimes darker side of American life more seriously. It is useful reading for editors and producers struggling to come to terms with the mass defection of an audience distracted by music videos and VCRs, compact discs and interactive TV.

As the title suggests, Dead Elvis is not biography but "a book about what Elvis Presley has been up to in the past fourteen years since he died." In one of the best chapters -- "Emanations, Sightings, Disappearances, and a Seance of Eighteen Mediums" -- Marcus chronicles the appearances ofe the mythic fallen Presley in diverse and wondrous ways and places. "No one," he writes, "could have predicted the ubiquity, the playfulness, the perversity, the terror, and the fun of this, of Elvis Presley's second life, a great common conversation; sometimes a conversation between specters and fans, made out of songs, artwork, books, movies, dreams; sometimes more than anything cultural noise, the glossolalia of money, advertisements, tabloid headlines, bestsellers, urban legends. . . ."

Journalism and popular culture have been on a collision course for years now, as movies, TV, and music increasingly take on, re-interpret, and sometimes re-invent issues and stories. Long after serious journalists concluded that they had taken the assassination of John F. Kennedy as far as they could, Oliver Stone's J. F. K. demonstrated that the story was very much alive and far from resolved for most Americans. Much of the mainstream media was enraged that a Hollywood producer would dare to encroach so wantonly on what it viewed as its turf -- the presentation of a major story like the murder of a president. Stone's movie was, in fact, just what it seemed: a declaration of war against the news media and their methodology and value system. At the same time, his journalistic instincts seemed remarkable in at least one sense: he seemed to know that many Americans were waiting for a new version of the killing that spoke to their misgivings.

Why do so many people cling to conspiracies? Or look for Elvis at their local gas station? And why does the press not help answer these questions? Many of America's best journalists remain clustered in Manhattan and around the White House, interviewing spokespeople and lobbyists, not the people who believe Oliver Stone or see Elvis waiting tables in malls. It's too bad -- there seem to be lots of them.

Dead Elvis is a kick, a trip to the funhouse that makes up America's most striking modern contribution to the world:; popular culture. The book makes clearer what drives people to gather at their kitchen tables all over America and lobby for Presley postal stamp images. It sends a message to the mainstream media as well: don't be so quick to leave JFK conspiracy theorists and the Presley legacy to the checkout-line browsers and their salacious media. In their preoccupation with weighty responsibilities, the media seem to be flirting with self-destructive elitism. Alive or dead, Elvis Presley is a big story, by any conventional journalistic definition. In Marcus's book, America is a different country -- strange, obsessed, haunted -- from the one we see on the front pages of The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times.

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