Author Archives: Matt Forney

This book was a massive letdown.

Coming after the pornographic gloriousness of Tool., Mine is a title that should have stayed buried on Peter Sotos’ computer. Tackling the same subject as Tool.—the lurid, bleak world of pedophilia, seedy hookups and gloryhole gayness—Mine lacks that work’s penetrating bite. The book is a sprawling mess of half-copied news reports, police interrogations and earnest confessions stretching out to infinity, where intrigue turns to boredom and finally disgust.

It’s not horrible, but it’s a poor example of Sotos’ talent.

Hell, the awful-looking cover should have been a dead giveaway that this book was a turkey. A bland recitation of child pornography-related citations, it’s the perfect way to prepare yourself for the dullness within. Ostensibly presented as the confessions of a child pornographer to an unknown third party (presumably a police officer, though the identities of both protagonist and antagonist are deliberately left vague), the book is a run-on series of improperly spaced declarations and reports:

I learned a long time ago. I watch the adults grow into their childhood stories, not the opposite. I know, for example, that if I’m moved to a response that I’ll do it from the wrong side of their clothes. I’ve done this with every single prostitute I’ve been with since I learned. I ask them to keep their clothes on. Sometimes I’ll pay extra so that they’ll finally put my dick into their mouths. I’m just fine, better even, masturbating while I stare at them and, more importantly, take in as much as they want to project at any given boredom cash amount of bother. I prefer that all these women leave their clothes on, don’t expose themselves, don’t touch me. I was getting them to pull my cock for awhile, like a kid’s handjob. But I stopped that soon enough too. I’d look for white women. Whatever that means these days. Just not the subsistence slime that I used to pick up in my late teens and early twenties. I don’t like lingerie the same way I don’t like ghetto skin. Which, in most cases back then, were bulky but braless sweaters and loose-stained stinking blue jeans. The ones with the make-up, the ones with hair that had been nodded out on, the rats that crawl out when they need to, I have a natural revulsion.

On and on it goes. The crisp, whiplash writing that Sotos displayed in Tool. gives way to a directionless ramble in Mine. The book appears to have no concrete structure or point, beyond a vague repetition of a handful of questions (e.g. “How frequently do you masturbate?”) that give Mine the musical sensibility of a hipster art noise band. The book has no separate parts or chapters; it’s just one stream-of-consciousness spew from beginning to end.

All 240 pages of it.

I started out liking Mine, but Sotos’ constant repetition and aimlessness quickly wore me down, leading me to glaze over whole paragraphs in an attempt to get to the end. The guilt-infused, confessional nature of this book is an interesting contrast to the triumphal tone of Tool., but Sotos does little to invest the reader in what’s going on, instead slopping on paragraphs like a five-year old drowning her meatloaf in ketchup:

You grind your ass like a nigger. I’ve fucked too many niggers. I didn’t want to fuck them anymore. As a child, the prostitutes acted as if they had something to sell. Something inescapable. I had an easier time avoiding them than their liberal goods and markets.

Bottom line: if you really, really like Sotos’ other works, Mine is worth reading. Everyone else should skip it.

Click here to buy Mine.

Read Next: Tool. by Peter Sotos

Tool. (yes, the period is part of the title) is one of those books that will neatly divide everyone who tries to read it into two camps. The first will be disgusted, horrified, repulsed by Peter Sotos’ depiction of the seedy, taboo underbelly of modern sexuality: child molestation, peep show booths, crack whores and worse. They’ll call it a degenerate book and demand that Sotos be locked away from polite society where he can’t hurt anyone.

The second camp will enjoy Tool. as a disturbing, haunting look into areas of the modern world that few dare to explore.

Peter Sotos is yet another GenX “subaltern” writer along the lines of Jim Goad, Hollister Kopp and more who rebelled against the America of Prozac Puritanism and paid for it with his freedom. In 1985, Sotos was arrested for possession of child pornography based on the fact that the second issue of his zine PURE (a zine dedicated to serial killer and sex crime lore) had a close-up of a little girl’s vagina on the cover. As he comments in Tool., written not long after his prosecution, the three leading TV stations in Chicago all showed that image in their coverage of his arrest.

Hypocrisy, much?

Tool. is more than just an intricate exploration of the thoughts and motivations of child molesters, serial killers and other like-minded criminals; it’s a blistering attack on the prurient, hypocritical manner in which society treats these crimes. We condemn “sex offenders,” serial murderers and the like all the while obsessing over news coverage of them, filling the airwaves and newspapers with detailed down-to-the-minute updates of their escapades. A white girl goes missing in Aruba and it becomes the lead story on Fox News for months. Casey Anthony murders her daughter and her trial is broadcast live on every cable news station. Ted Bundy abducts and murders young women for years and is besieged with love letters while he’s on death row.

We piously proclaim how evil these men are, yet we just can’t get enough of them.

Just be warned that Tool. isn’t for the weak of stomach. From the very beginning, Sotos assaults the reader with graphic intensity, shoving you nose-first into the depravity of the world, forcing you to inhale every scent. The introductory chapter, loosely inspired by the Moors murders, gives you a taste of what’s to come:

I like to watch you cry. It gives me such a hard-on. Do you know what a hard-on is? Cunt? Have you ever heard of a boner? An erection? A blood-engorged penis? No? A hard-on is for you. That’s right. Just for you. It’s what defines your entire existence. It’s what made you. It’s what drove your stupid fucking father to plug your disgusting pig-slut of a mother and produce you. But it’s more than that. Because, really, your father’s imbecility and your mother’s greed are hardly worth dwelling on here. An erection, which is another name for a big fucking hard-on, is what forces men—lesser men—to lower themselves to even consider women. You didn’t know that, did you? You see, men and women are very different, and yours is a rather sorry lot.

Feeling a little nauseous? If you’re a typical Prozac Puritan, Sotos knows exactly where to shiv you. His violent, erotic prose is designed to make you uncomfortable by presenting you with the consequences of your obsession. While at times a bit overwrought, Tool.’s prose maintains the same level of intensity throughout. Each chapter is also bookended with quick observations on Sotos’ arrest and trial.

To be frank, the darkly orgiastic tone of Tool. is possibly the only honest way to approach this kind of subject matter. By confronting the reader with the inner monologues of child rapists and degenerates on the down and out, even if fictional, Sotos presents a more complete analysis of taboo sexuality than all the serial killer biographies in the world. This is life, whether you like it or not, and closing your eyes won’t make it go away:

Second token: her top comes off. She tugs at the rubbery nipples and presses her ugly tits against the window. Her breasts are relatively young and on the firmish side. However, the stretch marks tell a story of disgusting motherhood, so I assume their non-sagginess is explicable due to the needs of a wanting water-head. It is a pleasure to see one so young and yet already so used-up. It is heartening to know she’ll raise more humans in her own image. Tits, which are probably the most hideous thing on Earth next to the cunt, are dead giveaways in the failure stakes. So many women build their entire personalities on these homely appendages that it can only do a man good to see them slap and fidget here in their natural habitat.

The one major flaw of Tool. is “Mine/Kept,” a translation of a presentation given by Sotos two years ago. It’s not terrible, but its tone completely clashes with the much-older and better written text of Tool. I found myself skipping through large parts of it out of boredom.

Aside from this, however, Tool. is a poignant and penetrating look at the underbelly of modern sexuality. Prozac Puritans beware: Peter Sotos has your number.

Click here to buy Tool.

Read Next: Heart Killer by Andy Nowicki

Are you sick of overwrought metaphors, unnecessarily big words and mawkish moralizing dressed up in highfalutin language? You’re not alone. The American literary establishment has been in the grip of talentless hacks for at least the past three decades, with shysters like David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster and others allowed to pass off substanceless word salad as authentic literature. My deep, burning hatred of “real” American literature comes from the fact that I was forced to read many of these hacks in college and take their writing seriously. It’s a perfect catch-22: these books are deliberately written to be confusing, so when you inevitably get frustrated with the likes of Infinite Jest or The New York Trilogy, you end up blaming yourself, thinking you’re not smart enough to understand the author’s hidden meaning.

As John Dolan wrote, “Those who squirt impenetrable clouds of ink do so for the same reasons squids do.”

Published just after the turn of the century, B.R. Myers’ book was a grenade rolled into the bunker of the New York literary establishment. Accused of shilling for the emperor in all his nakedness, Myers’ targets responded with vitriol and anger, the funniest/most ridiculous responses collected at the end of the book (the essay was originally published, in truncated form, in The Atlantic). A Reader’s Manifesto is a must-own because it articulates precisely why modern literature is such garbage, from basic prose all the way up to the themes that these writers obsess over.

You’ll find more literary merit in a Roosh V Forum post then in the entirety of the modern literary establishment.

Myers starts off by naming the cardinal sin of modern books: pretension. As American writers have become increasingly parochial and boring, their prose has inflated in response, like a pufferfish warding off predators. The writers of yesteryear who actually lived interesting lives—Bukowski, Hemingway, Céline—wrote simply and directly, without flowery, page-long metaphors or treacly dialogue. The writers of today, who have all the life experience of teenage virgins, create vast scrap heaps of useless adjectives:

Our “literary” writers aren’t expected to evince much in the way of brain power. Musing about consumerism, bandying about words like “ontological,” chanting Red River hokum as if it were a lost book of the Old Testament: this is what passes for intellectual content today. Nor do writers need a poet’s sensibility or a sharp eye. It is the departure from natural speech that counts, not what, if anything, is being arrived at. A sufficiently obtrusive idiom can even induce critics to overlook the sin of a strong plot. Conversely, though more rarely, a concise prose style can be pardoned if a novel’s pace is slow enough, as was the case with Ha Jin’s aptly titled Waiting, which won the National Book Award in 1999.

Myers goes on to skewer five of the most overrated, talentless phonies to ever inflict themselves on American letters: Auster, McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, and David Guterson. I would have appreciated a takedown of Wallace’s Infinite Jest, but I suppose it’s just as well seeing as an accurate deconstruction of that turd would take forever to put together. In each chapter, Myers identifies not only the writer’s bad prose—used as a smokescreen to hide the utter banality of their works—but their reliance on tired, moldy cliches. Every single one of these “intellectual” writers relies on tropes and ideas that were already regarded as hackneyed a hundred years ago:

This sort of thing might get Hass’ darkly meated heart pumping, but it’s really just bad poetry reformatted to exploit the lenient standards of modern prose. The obscurity of who’s will, which has an unfortunate Dr. Seussian ring to it, is meant to bully readers into thinking that the author’s mind operates on a plane higher than their own—a plane where it isn’t ridiculous to eulogize the shifts in a horse’s bowels.

Myers’ own prose has a sly comic quality; not too insulting, not too lenient, he butchers the writers of modern America and their slavering supporters in the pages of The New York Review of Books et al. with the same level of furor. In Myers’ estimation, the glad-handing and ass-kissing in the literary industry have created an incestuous system whereby bad writers like Auster or McCarthy continue to receive accolades for political reasons or, because the critics can’t understand the books’ squid-ink prose, they falsely assume there’s some kind of deeper meaning.

Good stories, strong characters and entertainment have taken a backseat to intellectual onanism.

Not only that, A Reader’s Manifesto will help you realize that there’s nothing wrong with liking so-called “genre fiction” or “pulp” (well, some of it, anyway); those books are actually entertaining. Indeed, in his chapter on “Muscular Prose,” Myers unfavorably compares Cormac McCarthy to Louis L’Amour, stating that not only was the latter a better writer and storyteller, his novels were a more truthful and honest depiction of the West than McCarthy’s. Yet the literary establishment, for all their “sensitivity,” shuns L’Amour because he didn’t use multiple-paragraph metaphors to describe horses defecating or something.

Myers closes out A Reader’s Manifesto with a response to his angry critics, none of whom understood the thrust of his argument. He also makes a humorous jab at modern literature with his final chapter, “Ten Rules for ‘Serious’ Writers”:

The joy of being a writer today is that you can claim your work’s flaws are all there by design. Plot doesn’t add up? It was never meant to; you were playfully reworking the conventions of traditional narrative. Your philosophizing makes no sense? Well, we live in an incoherent age, after all. The dialogue is implausible? Comedy often is. But half the jokes fall flat? Ah! Those were the serious bits. Make sure, then, that your readers can never put a finger on what you are trying to say at any point in the book. Let them create their own test — you’re just the one who gets paid for it.

If I were to criticize A Reader’s Manifesto for anything, it’s that Myers doesn’t go nearly far enough in his attack. Yes, the literary writers of today are terrible, and yes, the critics who praise them are disgusting boot-lickers, but the real problem with modern literature stems from the universities. From the minute they enroll in college, prospective young writers are forced to study the likes of Wallace, Toni Morrison, Robert Creeley and other talentless losers who can’t create a decent plot, can’t write a believable character, would be completely ignored were it not for English professors forcing their students to run up their loan debt buying them every semester. It’s the professors, jamming bright-eyed, bushy-eyed young men and women into the Strunk & White straitjacket, who are killing American literature, either by stripping young writers of their ability to depict the world naturally or by just plain discouraging them from writing to begin with.

Were it not for my discoveries of John Dolan, Céline, Philip K. Dick and a bunch of other “alternative” writers and novelists, I probably would have joined the latter group myself.

This is why A Reader’s Manifesto is required reading: it’s the most complete articulation of what is wrong with modern literature out there. It’s a necessary book for young men and women who want to become better writers, and a great read for older bibliophiles who are alienated by modern American letters.

Click here to buy A Reader’s Manifesto.

Read Next: Gun Fag Manifesto by Hollister Kopp

For Roosh, Poosy Paradise represents two steps forward and one step back.

I mean this in the nicest way possible. Poosy Paradise is a good book, an interesting book, a well-written book. It’s a book that displays Roosh’s evolution as a man and a social critic. But it falls short of the mark. In contrast to the straight-shooting, unpretentious style of Roosh’s previous memoir Why Can’t I Use a Smiley Face?, Poosy Paradise is marred by constant lapses into preachiness, which rob it of a great deal of emotional impact. To be sure, it’s not half as bad as the sentimentality of A Dead Bat in Paraguay, but that was also Roosh’s first memoir.

He shouldn’t be making the same mistakes five years later.

Maybe I’m just in a small minority, but I hate didacticism. Stories that try to force a moral or lesson down my throat make my skin crawl. I don’t know where it came from—maybe it was being forced to read David Foster Wallace in college, or maybe I was just born without the churl gene—but whenever a writer feels the need to ram a message down my throat, I dive for the exit.

A good writer lets his stories speak for themselves, he doesn’t speak for them.

I was hoping Roosh was starting to learn this lesson: as I mentioned already, Why Can’t I Use a Smiley Face? was just about perfect on this front. But I suppose I should have seen this coming with all the short stories he’s been posting in the past year, all of which have some kind of hackneyed moral or lesson. His best by far is “The Rat Mobility Experiment,” mostly because it’s the only story that is handled with subtlety. Poosy Paradise is unfortunately on the other side of the pool, wearing kiddie floaters and splashing water all over everyone.

The book concerns Roosh’s two-month stay in Romania, as he screws the local women and deals with newfound fame. One of the running threads throughout Poosy Paradise is Roosh constantly being dogged by local media. The story literally begins with him being interviewed by a Romanian TV crew, and throughout the book, Roosh becomes a minor celebrity, a fact that both helps—and hurts—his game:

“I’ll let you walk me halfway, and then when we are at a safe point, I will let you go and then walk home alone.” Interesting countermeasure, I thought. Other men must have successfully used the bathroom line on her. Her logical brain was dominating the interaction, so my best move was to make her horny. I stopped her along a thin alley and grabbed and kissed her. She resisted slightly at first but then got into it. I tried to press my boner into her body but through our coats I don’t think she felt it. After the kiss I said, “Let’s go for a walk this way so we can grab a drink.” I conveniently left out the fact that the drink was at my apartment 15 minutes away. It would be a tall order to get her back, but why not try?

The big thing that separates Poosy Paradise from Roosh’s previous books is that his behavior displays a certain maturity. Gone is the hopeful struggle of Paraguay or the despondent alienation of Smiley Face. Now, picking up girls is in the job description. There’s no anger when they flake, no disappointment when they play stupid games, and not even much pleasure when it finally comes time to bang. This is poosy paradise: the end game of more than a decade of trying to crack the dating code.

And if this is heaven, Roosh doesn’t know what it’s for.

That’s the ultimate point of Poosy Paradise: it doesn’t exist, or at least it doesn’t exist in a physical form. There is no country or land on Earth where any man can go and be instantly satisfied by the womenfolk. Poosy paradise is a state of mind, the result of your outer situation aligning with your inner desires. Do you want to bang a lot of girls? Thailand, Japan and the Philippines are your poosy paradise. Do you want wifely girls who desire to be the mother of your children? Eastern Europe is where you want to be. Do you want to be treated like a king by all the girls you meet? Try Africa. Poosy paradise is as real as green cheese on the moon.

Now if only Roosh could learn to make this point in an adult fashion.

Poosy Paradise’s narrative momentum is constantly halted by his obsession with going on paragraph-length dirges on the meaninglessness of life. You can’t go three pages without Roosh taking you out of the story to expound on some revelation about women, sex or the nature of human existence. And every single time this happens, his ordinarily gripping prose style falls apart, as he tries to ram his square peg into the round hole of didacticism:

There seem to be natural limits in banging a lot of girls where constraining factors appear and prevent you from achieving rock star status, forcing you to adopt an equilibrium state. A lot of sex often sucks out all of your horniness and motivation to bang more. Or it exhausts you, forcing you to rest. Or it puts a big dent in your wallet, forcing you to focus on work. Or you get a minor STD and need to heal up. Or, more commonly, your standards go up to where girls who were beautiful before are only average now. The 6s you banged were great, but why bang another 6 if you can try for the 7? Then you bang a couple 7s and now you want an 8, but there are not many 8s out there that can fill your pipeline as easily. If your game improves then your quality also improves. You become spoiled, reluctant to slip back down into average quality that satisfied you so easily before. Most girls, however, are average. Your rockstardom fades just after it begins. A cruel fate indeed.

At times, reading Poosy Paradise is like thumbing through one of those old-fashioned Calvinist children’s books, where the bad kids always get punished by drowning or being eaten alive by rats. It’s unpleasant, particularly because I know Roosh is smart enough not to fall for this bathetic bullshit. Writing a good story, fiction or nonfiction, is like air-drying laundry: you need to let it breathe if you want it to work. Instead, Roosh sucks up all his book’s oxygen and wastes it on telling the readers what we already know.

In pointing out these problems, I don’t want to sound too critical. Poosy Paradise is full of some truly remarkable and hilarious moments, as Roosh gives us an intimate look at the life of an “innovative casanova.” One segment near the end of the book, where he seduces a girl with a homemade “sex potion,” is both funny and poignant, because it gets across its point—a girl who consciously knows the “sex potion” is bogus, but chooses to believe in it anyway, a la Blanche DuBois’ cry “I don’t want realism, I want magic!”—without hammering you over the head. Had Roosh written the entire story like that, Poosy Paradise would be a shoo-in for one of the best books of the year.

Instead, we have the equivalent of a heavyweight getting clowned by a lightweight.

If you can look past its ham-handed moralizing, Poosy Paradise is an entertaining memoir and a depressing look at the state of modern love. But honestly, Roosh can do better. It’s painful to watch a guy I’ve seen steadily improving as a writer lapse back into these freshman-level errors. Here’s hoping his next work is a big improvement.

Click here to buy Poosy Paradise.

Read Next: Roosh’s Argentina Compendium: Pickup Tips, City Guides, and Stories by Roosh V

It’s easy to forget that prior to his career as The Exile’s book critic and his writing as the War Nerd, John Dolan was a poet. Not a very popular one either; as he lamented in a NSFWCORP article last year, he never could “get anybody to read the nice, simple gory stories I told with linebreaks because they think there must be a hidden subject, a secret code.” People with Real Lives Don’t Need Landscapes is the closest thing Dolan has to a widely known poetry book (mainly because it’s the most reasonably priced book of his on Amazon) and worth checking out even if you aren’t ordinarily a fan of verse.

People with Real Lives Don’t Need Landscapes is poetry for people who hate poetry.

The book hits you with Dolan’s trademark vitriol and bite literally from the cover; the blurb on the back may be one of the best in publishing history:

John Dolan taught in the English Department at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, from 1993 to 2001. Hired to teach basic reading and writing techniques to 900 snarling first-year med students per year, he survived eight years in the nightmarish job, finally clawing his way out of it and reaching a comfortable position in which he would teach only poetry workshops and advanced writing for the rest of his career. At this point, the fatally bad sense of timing which has determined his course in life led him to resign from his tenured job, claiming that he could not bear the sound of certain of his colleagues’ voices at the Wednesday staff meetings any longer. He left New Zealand to become a scurrilous journalist at the eXile, a Moscow expat paper which holds the current record for ‘most death threats against staff.’ As of this moment, Dolan is the only eXile staffer who has not been physically attacked, although, as he likes to boast, he was the subject of various voodoo death cults among the Dunedin med students, some of whom even produced an unflattering caricature of Dr. Dolan with the words ‘BLAH BLAH BLAH’ beneath it. Cowardice and vindictive paranoia combine to form Dolan’s crude blood-fingerprint poetic style.

Ouch. Most self-abasing writers at least wait until the reader has opened the book before they start bashing themselves.

Landscapes comprises nearly forty poems in a variety of styles, all of which feature Dolan’s characteristic black humor. He lambastes hippies in his anti-tree-hugging anthem “Let’s Clarify About the Trees,” retells the painful story of one of his high school crushes in “The High Elves of Pleasant Hill High School” (anyone who’s read Pleasant Hell will be familiar with this part of Dolan’s life), and rhapsodizes Mark David Chapman in “The Death of John Lennon as Miracle”:

Is Mark David Chapman
(the dirty little coward that shot Mister
Lennon) a saint?
He gets my vote for heaven,
Shot him the required three times:
3 miracles or as the Aztecs said,
‘Aha! These white men can be killed!’

Most of the subject matter of Landscape’s poems comprise Dolan’s usual fascinations: Irish nationalism, the Mongols, teenage awkwardness, and Californian suburbia. He’s at his best in telling brief, creepy stories of fucked up individuals, such as the half-retarded protagonist of “How I Killed the Mouse”:

And it was in the oven and it couldn’t get out and it went SKRICH SKRICH SKRICH and it didn’t work and it couldn’t get out because the oven the oven the oven isn’t all wood it’s like it’s hard all white and hard like on a bathtub instead of like wood and you can’t chew it so it was the mouse was going SKRICH SKRICH SKRICH all faster and it couldn’t get out and the oven was got all hotter and hotter and hotter

And you know what?

IT DIDN’T KILL IT!

Dolan’s poetry excels where virtually all modern poetry for one simple reason: it’s austere. There’s no secrets, no pretension, no deeper meaning; he just tells funny, frightening stories that just happen to rhyme and have meter. His verse follows in the tradition of Wallace Stevens, who lampooned the arrogance of Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams and the other hack poets of the day by writing about nothing.

My God, poetry that isn’t weighed down with idiotic, shopworn, obnoxious themes? It’s a miracle!

My biggest critique of Landscapes is that Dolan’s clipped, abbreviated style only really works with short poems. Any time he goes beyond two pages, such as in the paean to the Mongols that is “The Problem is How to Thank,” his verse style comes screeching to a halt. Additionally, the book itself is rather thin; at only 64 pages, I was left wanting more.

Aside from that, however, People with Real Lives Don’t Need Landscapes is a fantastic poetry collection. If you’re a fan of John Dolan (or even if you aren’t), it’s worth a read.

Click here to buy People with Real Lives Don’t Need Landscapes.

Read Next: Pleasant Hell by John Dolan

How exactly does a man find his calling in life? Is it through constant soul-searching? A near-death experience? A certain feeling that just comes from deep inside? Who knows? All I know is that Bradley Smith’s A Personal History of Moral Decay is about precisely this. While on the surface it presents itself as Smith’s personal memoirs, a collection of vignettes spanning nearly fifty years of his life, the real story is about his lifelong search for purpose.

And while Smith did find his muse, it took him well into middle age to get there.

And yes, this is the same Bradley Smith who’s made a career out of Holocaust revisionism, the same guy who wrote The Man Who Saw His Own Liver. It’s not spoiling too much to state that Smith chose challenging the mainstream Holocaust narrative as his purpose in life. Smith himself doesn’t even write about it too much; the bulk of the book is concerned with his tumultuous journey there.

Moral Decay begins with a familiar story: “Joseph Conrad and the Monster from the Deep,” first published as part of Liver, details how Smith accidentally killed his baby brothers when he was a boy. From there, we fast-forward to various segments of his life, from his service in the Korean War to his exploits in Mexico to his career as a war correspondent in Vietnam:

De Marion said: “Last month I met this broad in the park in San Pedro. She had red hair and we got to talking. Her old man had left her. One thing led to another and she offered me seventy-five dollars a week if I’d live with her and her two little girls. I tried it for a week but the kids were too much. They’d jump up on my lap and call me daddy, shit like that. I kept gettin’ a hard-on. What kind of daddy would I be, I thought? Another week and I’d be finger-fucking both of them and by the time they were ten I’d be peddling their ass. Nah, I thought, this isn’t the life for me, and I come to sea again.

Smith writes with an understated simplicity, the argot of a man with little education but a lot of brains. His prose is raw and functional, conveying the anarchy of war, the raunchiness of his comrades, the sincerity of his lovers with honesty and conviction. This is what writing is supposed to look like, before McSweeney’s, the New York Review of Books and the ivory tower ruined it all. While the book can seem thematically disconnected at points, as Smith zips between different time periods, the hilarity of his stories and uncompromising self-examination holds Moral Decay together.

And that’s what really sells the book: honesty.

Young Bradley comes off as an odd blend of Billy Pilgrim and Prince Myshkin, as he criss-crosses the country and the globe looking for adventure. Smith ruthlessly depicts his younger self as a twit: an endearing twit, a talented twit, but a twit nonetheless. Well into his thirties, Bradley can’t figure out what to do with his life. He flits from job to job in a haze, crashing at his parents’ house in between escapades. He dissolves his marriage with his first wife out of boredom. He tries on every hat he can find—soldier, journalist, bookseller, bullfighter—rejecting them all when the reality doesn’t match up with the dream. All the while, he keeps writing, his gormless navel-gazing failing to impress his friends or family:

“Then I saw that the producer, my aunty’s friend, was masturbating. We were in this private little screening room, you know how they have them, and he saw me staring at him. It was the most degrading thing I had ever seen. Here was this big burly man smoking a stogie and masturbating and saying: ‘Hey, this is the life, eh, Kid? Wha’cha say?’ And it was ten o’clock in the morning.”

What motivates Smith through these long years of shiftless drudgery is his belief in fairness, an odd sort of naivete in which he just wants to live and let live. It’s this fundamental belief that convinces him to take up the mantle of Holocaust revisionism just before his fiftieth birthday, on the premise that he believes the Germans are being unfairly slandered. Smith’s not German himself, mind you; he just hates oppression in all its forms. And just his luck: the cause he dedicates his life to is one that alienates him from most of his friends:

Reading the Sunday paper I find that Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, wants to force me by law to participate in a program (Medicaid) to pay for abortions on demand by pregnant women. I don’t want to. Glasser suggests I don’t want to because of my religious beliefs. I don’t have any. Not only does Glasser want to direct my acts of conscience by the threat of force, but he wants to justify his initiation of violence by falsely attributing to me beliefs I don’t have.

I suppose that’s life: we can’t choose what we get passionate about.

Reading Moral Decay made me wonder if I’d ever have my own revelation. I assume at some point, I’m going to look back on the writing I produced during this period and think, “What the hell was I thinking?” Of course, if Smith hadn’t spent his twenties and thirties in a state of perpetual ennui, he wouldn’t have gained the perspective that inspired him to make defending Holocaust revisionism his life’s work. I’m pretty sure that wherever I’m heading, the period of my life where I was posting ridiculously offensive blog posts will have helped me—in small way—get there. Each step we take, even the missteps, makes us grow as men. Yes, we’re going to make mistakes, say and do stupid shit along the way. That’s life.

Without those mistakes—without the cold, hard lessons they teach us—we’d never figure out what to do with ourselves.

The other noteworthy aspect of Moral Decay is the sense of satisfaction it exudes. Not the smug satisfaction of a writing workshop dimwit who just learned how to use metaphors, but the serenity of a man who has achieved everything he set out to do. I don’t know Bradley Smith personally, but it’s obvious that he’s near the end of his life. In contrast to the mortality-driven panic that grips most old farts as they seek ever more expensive ways to prolong their pathetic lives, Smith seems content with the way things have unfolded for him. He spent the first half of his life having fun adventures and the second tirelessly working for an unfashionable but noble cause.

If he were to pass away tomorrow, this book would be the perfect epitaph.

That’s A Personal History of Moral Decay. If you enjoy funny memoirs filled with adventure, raunchy language and sex, you’ll love Smith’s contribution for that alone. But peer past the fucking and the four-letter words and you’ll find a powerful story about a man seeking to find his place in the world. More importantly, Moral Decay is about having the courage to follow through on your convictions even when doing so means you may lose everything.

Ultimately, it’s that conviction that determines who you become.

Click here to buy A Personal History of Moral Decay.

Read Next: The Man Who Saw His Own Liver by Bradley Smith

In addition to his detective fiction under the Cigars and Legs series, Adam Lawson also dabbles in fantasy. The Five is the first (and to date only) book in the Sword of Nalin series, a tongue-in-cheek but serious-minded fantasy title. It’s a decent outing for Lawson, but formatting and plot issues drag it down.

The central characters of The Five are a collective of science geeks who, while working on a project for the government, get sucked into an alternate dimension where magic reigns supreme over technology. Summoned by the warrior Zern, they’re tasked with helping her overthrow a tyrannical queen and restore freedom to the land.

He looked her over again, trying his hardest to feign disinterest, but let his eyes linger a bit. She put her hands on her hips. “Aiden.”

“Yes?” he asked. He looked her in the eyes again.

“They’re just breasts.”

Ryan chortled. Aiden could swear he heard Tara’s elbow hit ribs.

“Yes, I can see that,” Aiden said.

“I know you can, because you keep looking at them,” Zern said.

The Five’s semi-comic tone and acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of its own premise help keep the book interesting, but the book’s weak ending (as mentioned, Lawson will be continuing the story in additional novels) left me feeling cold. Additionally, when I read the book months ago, Chapter 2 (which describes how Aiden and his cohort of nerds get into this mess) is repeated, line-for-line, something like seven times throughout the first half of the book. It was a formatting screw-up on Lawson’s part and he’s since fixed it, but when I was reading the book, it made me mash my Kindle’s touch screen like a spastic epileptic trying to move the story along.

Bottom line: if you like fantasy stories and/or Lawson’s other work, you’ll like The Five. Everyone else should skip it.

Click here to buy The Five.

Read Next: The Boots Come Off by Adam Lawson