Author Archives: Matt Forney

On the recommendation of Blowhard, Esq., I checked out this novella from Lloyd Fonvielle, best known for being the guy who wrote the screenplay for The Mummy (the original, not the godawful sequels), and I have to say that I liked it. It’s brief, it’s concise, it’s thrilling and believable and doesn’t talk down to the reader.

In other words, it’s everything that fiction should be.

Missouri Green is a Western, revolving around the eponymous protagonist, a New Orleans prostitute who tires of her job and decides to make the perilous journey west to California. To help her survive the journey and mine for gold, she buys herself a slave named Jim, a highly-skilled outdoorsman. I can’t help but see this as a blatant reference to Huckleberry Finn, not only because Missouri constantly calls him “Nigger Jim” (“nigger”-phobic liberals beware), but because a big part of the plot concerns her learning to respect Jim and view him as a smart, loyal human being:

She smiled at him fondly. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere, Jim. You know that.” She reached out for his hand and pulled him down and he sat beside her on the bed. “You love me, don’t you, Jim?”

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

“And you know I love you?”

“Yes, ma’am. I know.”

“Then we had the best of it, Jim— the best there is in this sorry world.” She ran her finger across his face, leaned up and kissed him on the cheek. Then she lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. “I guess I’ll go to Hell for that. Find out soon enough, won’t I, Jim?”

Fonvielle deftly avoids falling into the “magical negro” trap by depicting Jim with complexity and depth. He begins the novel openly resentful of Missouri and even comes close to murdering her a couple of times. None of this feels forced, though, thanks to Fonvielle’s crisp, unpretentious style and economical use of words (the book can be read in less than an hour):

Missouri took the bill of sale out of a pocket in her dress and said, “What the hell do you think that is? Says I bought him.”

Harpending stood up with righteous indignation shaking his whole frame. He said, “That paper is an affront to God and Christian civilization!”

“England don’t tell us what to do no more. We throwed you off so we could be free.”

“Do you realize the idiocy of the words you’ve just spoken?”

“Do you realize you’re a jackass?”

Harpending picked up a tin plate and a fork and banged them together loudly.

The book starts to come apart in the final chapter, but otherwise, Missouri Green is a damn good read, and worth a look even if you aren’t normally into this kind of genre fiction.

Click here to buy Missouri Green.

Read Next: Disgruntled Fat Sluts of the World, Unite!

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on February 15, 2010. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

For all my busting of libertarians’ balls, I was more sympathetic towards libertarianism when I was younger. While in high school and searching for an ideological pier to tether my boat to, I happened upon my mom’s collection of dog-eared paperbacks by the world’s most famous female autist, Ayn Rand. Her philosophy and its ethos of capitalism, logic and reason was a refreshing change from the soft, squishy socialism that permeated the teachings of the Catholic school I attended. I glommed onto her worldview like a barnacle on an oil tanker, quickly devouring her four novels and her countless essay collections. I even cited Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness in an essay in my religion class on how to create a world free of war and violence. I was just a kid then; I didn’t notice Rand’s repetitious, Aspergery writing style, her turgid prose, the massive logical holes in her arguments, her complete lack of humor (actual Rand quote from The Philosophy of Objectivism: “The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.”), and the fact that her writing actually got WORSE as time went on. Once I started tearing into the likes of Hayek, Mises, and Kirk, I was done with Rand for good. Objectivism is only a credible philosophy to the young and pliable of mind.

The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays, by L.A. Rollins, is the kind of book I wish I had had during my teenage years, as it would have saved me a whole lot of winding through bad writing. Rollins’ tract takes the foundation of modern libertarianism–the concept of natural rights–and not only smashes it into teeny-tiny pieces, he makes libertarian icons like Rand, Murray Rothbard, and others look like complete and utter morons in the process. As such, it’s a must-own book for anyone interested in political theory.

As Chip Smith, whose Nine-Banded Books has republished The Myth along with a collection of Rollins’ other work, writes:

Originally published by Loompanics Unlimited in 1983, the central monograph is a two-fisted display of lib-targeted philosophical shit-stirring that holds up well after 25 years. In its previous incarnation, The Myth provoked a fair amount of measured praise along with entertaining fits of blustery outrage among libertarian stalwarts and natural law votaries, with much of the tooth-gnashing playing out in the pages of the Sam Konkin’s old New Libertarian magazine. Rollins’ thesis also famously prompted movement luminary Murray Rothbard to pen a delightfully truculent head-in-the-sand essay enjoining “The Duty of Natural Outlaws to Shut Up,” and it inspired Robert Anton Wilson to publish a lively book-length companion essay entitled Natural Law: Or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy.

The central argument of The Myth of Natural Rights is that the concept of natural rights, as formulated by Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and serving as the foundation of libertarian theory, is a fiction, a religious idea that has zero relevance in the real, secular world. As blogger TGGP of Entitled to an Opinion writes in his introduction:

Without giving the game away, it is perhaps better to start out by saying what natural rights are not than what they are. If one were to begin a sentence with the phrase “natural rights are,” that sentence would already be false. Natural rights are not. That they do not exist is the blunt thesis of The Myth. Natural rights are the tooth-fairies of political philosophy, claiming no more substance than the epiphenomenal gremlins inhabiting Daniel Dennett’s car engine. Despite the carefully parsed semantic rigging, a “natural right” is to be found nowhere in nature, and unlike an actual legal or customary right, it confers no protection upon its claimant.

Rollins’ monograph is less polemic than carefully researched academic argument, albeit written with a snarky undertone, free of filler (the primary text of The Myth clocks in at less than seventy pages), and absent the panicked defensiveness that characterizes academic writing. In the opening chapters, Rollins draws a distinction between natural rights, which are “fake or metaphorical rights,” and “real rights” or “positive rights,” describing the latter as “those rights that are actually conferred and enforced by the laws of a State or the customs of a social group.” Contrasting the two groups, Rollins reduces natural rights to little more than wishful thinking on the part of libertarians, mocking them as “bleeding heart libertarians” who conjure up bogus rights out of thin air.

My biggest complaint with The Myth is that the bulk of it is focused not on proving the phoniness of natural rights but on making mincemeat of noted libertarians who base their arguments on the theory. To be sure, Rollins accomplishes his goal with aplomb, tearing Rand, Rothbard, Tibor Machan, and others to shreds, exposing the gaping holes, paradoxes, and pretzel-like mutilations of logic in their writings. In particular, his chapter on Rand rips apart her rationalist, atheist facade to reveal a deeply religious, irrational woman, amusingly dubbing her “Mrs. Illogic.” By spending most of his time picking fights with other intellectuals instead of making an independent argument, Rollins limits The Myth’s effectiveness as a standalone work. Nonetheless, for those who are looking for an airtight reason to disavow mainstream libertarianism once and for all, or those who’re looking for a book on ideology that is unlike anything else out there, The Myth of Natural Rights is a text you should read ASAP.

Reviewing this book without mentioning the “other essays” in the title would be dumb, considering that those “other essays” make up two-thirds of The Myth’s pages. The middle third of the book is a trio of essays on Holocaust revisionism which displays Rollins’ penchant for misanthropic iconoclasm. (DISCLAIMER FOR THE SLOW: While I support the rights of Holocaust revisionists and deniers to speak their minds, I am not a revisionist or denier myself.) In “The Holocaust as Sacred Cow,” he lays into “Holocaustorians” who perpetuate falsehoods about the Holocaust and who refuse to debate the subject, comparing them to religious fanatics. On the subject of the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust, he writes:

For many people, the six million figure is not a fact, although they call it that; rather it is an article of faith, believed in not because of compelling evidence in its support, but because of compelling psychological reasons. For such people, the Six Million figure is a Sacred Truth, not to be doubted and, if necessary, to be defended with dogmatism, mysticism, illogic, fantasy or even downright lies.

The second essay, “Revising Holocaust Revisionism,” is by far the most interesting of the bunch, because in it Rollins turns his guns on revisionists for pushing falsehoods and lies, accusing them of having hidden agendas beyond “set[ting] the record straight”. At the end of the paper, he declares himself to be “skeptical of both sides”, stating that “[n]either side in the Holocaust controversy claims a monopoly on falsehood.” The final essay, “Deifying Dogma,” is the most boring, as it’s nothing more than a point-by-point refutation of the anti-revisionist tract Denying History by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, who made the fatal error of smearing Rollins in its pages. Remind me to never get on this guy’s bad side, as it makes for poor writing on his part.

The remainder of The Myth is devoted to L.A. Rollins’ satirical writings, serving as the cherry on this ice cream sundae of idol destruction. “Lucifer’s Lexicon: An Updated Abridgment” is a Samuel Johnson-esque collection of witty, laugh-out-loud definitions (ex: “Blowjob, n. A nice job, if you can get it.”) that deserve to be re-published on their own. On the other hand, “An Open Letter to Allah” is simply awful, tenth-rate anti-religious invective delivered in the voice of a Rand-drunk teenager who keeps a copy of The God Delusion under his pillow. “An Ode to Emperor Bush” is a moderately entertaining bit of doggerel, but it lacks the spark that makes “Lucifer’s Lexicon” such a wicked read. The book would have been improved if both of these diversions had been taken out.

Aside from its few flaws, The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays is a great read, a well-crafted collection of works by a sadly-forgotten writer. Whether you’re interested in shibboleth-skewering essays or satirical shots at sacred cows, you ought to pick this one up.

Click here to buy The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays.

Read Next: Some Thoughts on Hitler and Other Essays by Irmin Vinson

A few weeks back, I nearly sliced my finger off.

I was cutting open a package of kielbasas and pushed the knife in too hard, plunging it straight through the plastic and into the tip of my left hand’s middle finger. I immediately dropped what I was doing and ran over to the sink to wash up, but the blood was flowing too fast and the bandages I put on kept slipping off. I eventually gave up and went upstairs to the bathroom, sucking on my finger to keep from leaking arterial blood all over my house. I poured some hydrogen peroxide on my finger, then wound a gigantic gauze pad around the tip, holding it in place with some surgical tape for good measure. It took at least an hour for the wound to close up, and I was in enough pain that I couldn’t use my left hand to type or lift anything for the next couple of days.

That experience was far less painful than reading The Red Pill.

This isn’t just the worst book in the manosphere, it’s easily one of the worst books I’ve ever read. And as much as it pains me to write this review, seeing as R.J. Patton is one of us—he posts as “painter” over at Roosh’s forum—I can’t sugarcoat the truth. The Red Pill is so bad that reading it felt like having one of those ancient Egyptian brain removal hooks shoved up my nose. Everything about it is flat, cliched and excruciating.

The Red Pill is a novella about taking the red pill, as it were, focusing on a guy named Andrew who decides to take charge of his health, career and love life. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same plot as A Generation of Men, with one main character as opposed to three. But compared to The Red Pill, Frost is practically the next Houellebecq, because this book reads like an Horatio Alger movie adaptation by the autistic progeny of Ayn Rand and Judd Apatow. Just sample the first paragraph of the first fucking chapter:

He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep, and he couldn’t go more than thirty seconds without thinking about Natalie and how much he loved her. She meant everything. She was the sun, the moon, the stars, and the air he breathed. But Natalie didn’t love him anymore and Andrew just wanted to roll over and die. He didn’t realize until she dumped him how much his world revolved around her and now that she was gone his suffering seemed immeasurable.

Now imagine a hundred pages of this. The neverending run-on sentences. The repetitive, brain-dead cliches. The bland fourth-grade vocabulary.

And worst of all, the awful characterization.

The characters in The Red Pill aren’t one-dimensional, they’re no-dimensional. There’s not a single bit of nuance or meaningful development among them. The good guys, like Andrew and his magical alpha mentor Adam, are saintly and heroic; the villains, such as Andrew’s roommate Joe and his sister Tracy, are stupid, snotty, lazy and entitled. They don’t even rise to the level of archetypes; they’re fucking manosphere mad libs:

Tracy looked up calmly, relishing how easily it was to push his buttons and moved in for the kill. “Aw, poor baby. Can’t keep his girlfriend and now it’s my fault? I don’t think so. Fine, you want the truth, Mom and Dad? Natalie told us she broke up with him because he got violent with her. She was terrified Andrew was going to hurt her! I don’t blame her for one second. You need to learn to control your anger or no woman will ever come near you!”

Andrew stood there shocked, unable to even move. Natalie was telling everyone he hit her? He started shaking, tears springing to his eyes. He had to get out of there before he exploded and stalked out of the dining room.

“See what I mean?” he heard Tracy saying behind him, “I told you he’s a psycho.”

Our story begins with our intrepid hero reeling from a bad breakup. Having discovered his girlfriend Natalie moonlighting as the town bicycle, Andrew decides to kill himself out of grief. And despite having only known him for a few pages, I was praying for him to go through with it. “She was sucking every dick within a five-mile radius, you dipshit! Why do you want her back?” Like I said, the characterization is so flat and Manichean it’s unbelievable; even after Natalie and her father steal half his things when they get her stuff from their apartment (which comes after he threatens to kill Andrew if he goes near her again), he still begs her to come back to him.

PROTIP to aspiring novelists: if I’m rooting for your protagonist to huff some carbon monoxide before the first chapter is over, you have failed as a storyteller.

But alas, God and gravity intervene to keep Andrew from hanging himself, and he moves into a new apartment with his best buddy Joe. By sheer random chance, his new next-door neighbor is Emily, an old crush of his from high school, and he predictably tries to Compliment & Cuddle his way into her vagina. It works as well as you’d expect, but Andrew manages to parlay his friendzone status into a date at a bar on State Street (presumably, The Red Pill takes place in Madison, Wisconsin), where they meet Adam, the guy who changes Andrew’s life forever.

Adam is the lead singer in a Doors tribute band, which drives Emily wild. A few days later, after they start hooking up, Andrew runs into Adam outside and inexplicably starts monologuing to him about his 99 problems. Adam decides that this is a perfect opportunity to monologue back at him:

“I was the biggest loser. I couldn’t get a date, I couldn’t play sports besides tennis, which everybody laughed at. My parents were crazy, my Dad was a drunk and my Mom ran off with some drug addict biker when I was nine years old. I didn’t fit in anywhere no matter how hard I tried. Hell, even my teachers hated me. I tried everything to fit in and nothing worked until I was so far down I finally realized I already had something to hold on to. The one thing that wouldn’t make fun of me, that didn’t give a shit about what I looked like or where I came from or where I was going. You know what that was?”

After this stilted heart-to-heart, Adam decides to take Andrew under his wing and teach him the ways of the red pill. Thanks to the book’s godawful dialogue and characterization, Adam comes off more like a male Manic Pixie Dream Girl than the zero-turned-hero cool guy that he’s supposed to be, and violently homoerotic passages like this don’t help:

Finally, they were done and Andrew’s entire body was sore, limbs burning, but he also felt pumped up at the same time. They went to the mens’ locker room and Adam tossed him a white towel from a neat pile by the door. “You can leave your stuff right here,” he pointed to the bench running along the row of lockers, “Don’t worry, this place is safe and secure, you won’t get ripped off like a regular gym.” With that he opened his locker and stripped all his clothes off. Andrew hesitated for a moment, self conscious. Compared to Adam he was thin and small and scrawny, but he took off his sweaty clothes, wrapped the towel around himself and followed a naked Adam to the adjacent white tiled room with a row of four open showers. He was impressed at how clean everything was and his self consciousness went away as he washed up under the hot water.

I half-expected a surprise twist where Andrew and Adam confessed their love for each other, then run off to get gay married.

From here, The Red Pill devolves into montage territory, with Andrew slowly getting cut, starting his own small business, and learning how to behave with a sack around girls, puffed up with horrifying segments where he and Adam monologue at each other. Even John Galt would tell these guys to give it a fucking rest. And naturally, Andrew’s fat feminist sister, once the pride of the family, is forced to move out and get a real job. Every time you think things can’t get worse, the book somehow manages to yank another clump of brain out through your nostrils.

But the real scorn is reserved for Joe. Jealous of Andrew’s success, angry at his fat Asian girlfriend (there’s a segment where he flips out and punches her), and unwilling to make the effort to improve his life, Joe succumbs to omega rage and decides to murder him, Adam and Emily in the final chapter. Again, if this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same plot twist that A Generation of Men had, and it’s just as fake, manipulative and cheap here as it was there:

The look in Joe’s bloodshot eyes was pure hate and evil and Andrew would never forget it. His friend dropped down onto him, knees crushing him like boulders, knocking the wind out of him. Andrew gasped for air, saw one large fist come angling down from high above, smashing hard into his face, and then another and another. “You think you’re so much better than me, huh?” Joe roared. “Not so fucking tough now, are you? You or you’re fucking new best friend!”

Another tip for aspiring novelists: pouring blood and dismembered body parts all over your draft does not make it good. Stop ripping off Bret Easton Ellis. He wasn’t that good to begin with, and your tenth-generation Xeroxes of his phony secular Augustinian shtick don’t even have the few things that make it bearable: his believable characters and sense of humor.

I expect this sentimental garbage from the likes of Oprah, not from the manosphere.

The closest thing I can muster in defense of The Red Pill is that it’s not intended for the manosphere; Patton wrote it for the purpose of bringing unconverted guys around to our way of doing things. But the book is so shoddy that it almost made me want to send a big check to David Futrelle. At best, The Red Pill comes off as a pitiful nerd’s revenge fantasy, with all the storytelling quality of a high schooler’s fan fiction. Again, it doesn’t make me feel good panning a fellow manospherian’s book—and I don’t know Patton that well, I assume he’s a nice guy—but I can’t simply ignore a book that put me in physical pain while I was reading it.

If this is The Red Pill, I wish I had taken the blue pill.

Click here to buy The Red Pill.

Read Next: Journey of a Red Pill Princess

Attention, horny hacks! Want to film two people having sex without being dismissed as a B-movie schlockmeister? Simple: call your little porn flick “art” and watch the critics fall all over themselves to praise your genius. Requiem for a Dream, “Piss Christ,” Passage; there is no limit to what garbage you can pass off so long as the general public thinks you’re making some deep statement about human nature.

If you doubt me, check out Vivid (aka Luscious), the “highly regarded but sexually charged Canadian art film,” so highly regarded that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. The movie is at best on the level of a film school project, or at least it would be were it not for all the shots of Kari Wührer and Stephen Shellen rolling around naked. In terms of artistic merit, it’s sandwiched between The Devil in Miss Jones and the Hysterical Fiction video series.

In other words, if you’re looking to jack off without feeling too guilty, you should check it out.

The setup is simple enough: Shellen plays Cole, a manic-depressive painter suffering a drought of inspiration, and Wührer is his girlfriend Billie suffering his various psychotic outbursts. He also won’t have sex with her, which is immediately where the movie loses me, because any man who would refuse to fuck Kari Wührer circa 1997 is a repressed homosexual.

Cole cajoles Billie into posing nude for him, which causes him to Hulk out, smashing his canvas to bits and tearing his shirt off. She defiantly pledges to “never [pose] for [him] again,” leaves to go to work and comes home later to find him curled up in the fetal position on the floor. Their relationship is about as believable as that of a porn chick who offers to pay the pizza boy in blowjobs, and the clunky dialogue doesn’t help. Every line in Vivid seems like it was written by a teenage fat girl who gets all her information about sex from Charlotte Brontë novels, though I did chuckle when Billie huffily announces that she’s going to jill off in the shower: “Like I’m gonna let you watch.”

And this is only the first fifteen minutes! We’ve got another hour of this swill left!

The next day is when the stupid shit hits the fan. Cole discovers that Billie has thrown away a cupcake that his mother gave him—a cupcake that was weeks old and covered in mold—and nearly starts crying. At this point, I was hoping Billie would crack him over the head with a chair and run off to get fucked by the mailman, but instead she apologizes and offers to make it up to him by posing nude again. After Cole—shock, horror, surprise—nearly has another psychotic breakdown, Billie cleverly impugns his masculinity by telling him he “can’t even get [his] brush up” (I see what you did there, movie), which provokes him to angrily throw paint on her and fuck her atop one of his canvasses.

A new form of art is born!

This is where Vivid loses what little narrative coherency it had and devolves into a series of repetitive sex scenes, interspaced with some of the most tedious improvised dialogue outside of a mumblecore flick. For the first act of the film, we were at least left wondering whether Cole would come out of the closet, or whether Billie would get fed up and stab him in the chest with a kitchen knife. Gone, completely gone. With both his artistic muse and libido back, Cole becomes the toast of the art world, free to gaze into the camera with his tortured artist eyes or engage in horrific pillow talk. We learn that Billie’s pussy tastes like raspberries, watch them playfully tease each other about how they sound when they cum, and get drawn-out descriptions of Cole’s horrible, horrible nightmares.

And it’s all set to an overly-loud soundtrack of whatever generic nineties alt-rock that the filmmakers could afford to license.

The plot finally returns about an hour in, when Billie leaves for New York on a modeling assignment. While she’s gone, Susan, one of Cole’s clients and friends, visits and convinces him to let her join in on the paint fornication fun. As you would expect, Billie comes home a little too early and is shocked to find a naked blonde diddling herself with a foot-long zucchini on her living room floor. Cole, being his usual whiny sociopath self, doesn’t understand why she’s upset. At this point, Billie finally decides to leave the little creep, but he manages to cajole her into not only staying, but letting him fuck her in the butt.

Though given that her sole objection is that “[her] ass just isn’t designed for that,” it really isn’t that big of an accomplishment.

Cole and Billie’s anal adventures end about ten seconds later when she starts shrieking on the first thrust, and they inexplicably decide to abandon their fucking on canvass experiment and go back to regular painting and modeling. Cole’s painter block returns, they have another yelling match, and I started rooting for them to kill each other and get it over with. “Do it Billie! Shoot him in the heart! Bake him some poison cupcakes! Lorena Bobbitt his psycho ass!”

But nope, the closest she gets to murdering this asshole is slapping him across the face, then grabbing the paintbrush and stabbing his canvass in rage.

This magically resolves everything. Cole decides to start painting Billie in various poses: while she’s sleeping, lying on the couch or painting her own masterpiece. Awwwwww.

Vivid is extraordinarily stupid and lazy, softcore for the pretentious. It isn’t even entertaining in a so-bad-it’s-good way, because that would require effort from the filmmakers. Hell, I almost want to give the movie points for its near-parodic depiction of modern art fans being gullible idiots, snapping up the Pollack-esque paint smears that Cole and Billie call “paintings.” But it’s not even smart enough to do that.

If you’re the kind of conceited jerk who listens to This American Life and thinks that mainstream porn is too “misogynistic,” you’ll like Vivid because it will let you get your rocks off while still thinking you’re better than the plebs. If you’re a devout Mormon stuck in a cycle of buying Penthouse mags, whacking off and burning them to keep your wife from finding out, you’ll like Vivid because it’s arty enough to keep those feelings of shame away.

Everyone else?

Skip it, unless you think full-frontal nudity from Kari Wührer is worth an hour-and-a-half of terrible dialogue.

Click here to buy Vivid.

Read Next: Gangster Squad and Leftist Solipsism

Flannery O’Connor is another great writer who’s been sidelined by the Western literary establishment for the dumbest of reasons. Unlike Céline, she hasn’t been totally written out of the history books; because O’Connor had the good fortune to be born with a vagina, the Beigeists begrudgingly include a couple of her short stories in the college English curriculum. But I guarantee that most of the non-humanities-majoring public has never heard her name.

All of the attention goes to O’Connor’s pious fraud contemporary Harper Lee.

Part of it is because O’Connor died young, wasting away from lupus not long after her 39th birthday. O’Connor was also a devout Catholic, which has been a death sentence in English-speaking countries ever since the days of Henry VIII. But the main reason why Lee is worshipped and O’Connor is ignored is because once again, Lee was an entrepreneur masquerading as a social critic. Where O’Connor was a low-key figure who spent most of her life in the rural Georgia town where she grew up, Lee moved to New York and schmoozed her way into the nation’s literary elite. Her To Kill a Mockingbird is popular and beloved because it caters to the Northern left-wing establishment’s self-congratulatory view of not only the South, but themselves.

Blogger Thrasymachus wrote the ultimate takedown of Mockingbird here, but I’ll sum it up for you. Mockingbird is garbage because it absolves Lee’s social class—the wealthy, upper-class elite—of their responsibility in fostering the culture of racism in the Jim Crow South. In the novel, all of Maycomb’s racism emanates from the Ewells, a despised and ostracized clan of white trash who live in a tin shack behind the town dump. Atticus Finch, the town lawyer (and by extension one of the most powerful and respected men in Maycomb) is not hostile to blacks; neither is the town sheriff or the other middle-class families in town. Even the working-class families such as the Cunninghams aren’t overtly and violently racist.

And yet despite being the only racists in town, the poor and hated Ewells somehow wield enough influence to get a black man convicted of a crime he clearly did not commit.

That’s why Mockingbird is part of every high school curriculum in America and why Wise Blood is read only by disaffected intellectual arsonists like myself; it’s libelous, self-serving and reaffirms the prejudices of its leftist readers. Black people are good, middle-class white people are good, poor white people are the root of all evil, and “the loss of innocence” is a real tragedy. That’s a great metric for determining whether something’s worth your time; if a book or movie is described as being about “the loss of innocence,” run the hell away like you’re being accosted by a lesion-covered junkie wielding a syringe.

Flannery O’Connor didn’t have time to tickle the fancies of Northern Puritans; she was too busy sketching the most realistic and gripping portrait of her native land since Mark Twain passed. Like Twain, O’Connor eschewed piety and sentimentality and depicted Southerners—white or black, rich or poor, man or woman—as they were: wretched, stupid, and corrupt. In her world, no one is innocent and everyone has the blood of classism and racism on their hands, including blacks themselves.

She also didn’t mince words, using “nigger” frequently (see: “The Artificial Nigger”), which to liberals is like garlic to a vampire.

O’Connor’s writing is also informed by her Catholic beliefs; many of her protagonists mirror the alienation she felt growing up in a strongly Protestant land:

It was the first hand that had been extended to Enoch since he had come to the city. It was warm and soft.

For a second he only stood there, clasping it. Then he began to stammer. “My name is Enoch Emery,” he mumbled. “I attended the Rodemill Boys’ Bible Academy. I work at the city zoo. I seen two of your pictures. I’m only eighteen years old but I already work for the city. My daddy made me come…” and his voice cracked.

The star leaned slightly forward and a change came in his eyes: an ugly pair of human ones moved closer and squinted at Enoch from behind the celluloid pair. “You go to hell,” a surly voice inside the ape-suit said, low but distinctly, and the hand was jerked away.

Informed by her Catholicism, O’Connor also wrote her characters with the promise of redemption. Not unlike Andy Nowicki (another Southern Catholic), O’Connor knew that even the most degenerate man or woman carried with them the possibility of repentance. It’s this cocktail of wisdom and observation that makes Flannery O’Connor not only a standout in American and Western literature, but a standout among women writers period.

The Complete Stories, as the title implies, is a volume containing every short story that O’Connor ever wrote, combining all the stories from her two previous collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, along with several unpublished works. Her stories dovetail into every aspect of mid-20th century Southern life, from racism to classism to politics and love. No one is safe from her gaze, whether it’s Old Dudley, the bitter old protagonist of “The Geranium,” grumbling about his educated Northern black neighbor or Mrs. Willerton, the vapid housewife heroine of “The Crop,” repeatedly trying to write a novel and failing miserably:

Social problem. Social problem. Hmmm. Sharecroppers! Miss Willerton had never been intimately connected with sharecroppers but, she reflected, they would make as arty a subject as any, and they would give her that air of social concern which was so valuable to have in the circles she was hoping to travel! “I can always capitalize,” she muttered, “on the hookworm.” It was coming to her now! Certainly! Her fingers plinked excitedly over the keys, never touching them. Then suddenly she began typing at great speed.

If you’re looking for an introduction to Flannery O’Connor’s work, The Complete Stories is by far your best bet. The biggest criticism I have of the collection is that several of the previously unpublished stories are redundant; O’Connor later reworked them into the plot of her first novel, Wise Blood. Nonetheless, The Complete Stories is a great read for those interested in truly talented writers.

Click here to buy The Complete Stories.

Read Next: The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories by Andy Nowicki

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on November 22, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

This one’s a little different: Jack has released this compact little book for free on his website, but he’s politely requested donations for the hard work he put into it. A brief (less than 40 pages) meditation on modern masculinity, No Man’s Land is a nice introduction to manosphere and anti-feminist thought, short enough to knock off while you’re waiting at the dentist’s.

And did I mention that it’s free?

No Man’s Land consists of three chapters, the first two taking a sledgehammer to the various “man up” arguments coming from femiservatives like Kay Hymowitz, Bill Bennett and Michael Kimmel, among other things. With unpretentious and powerful language, Donovan exposes the emptiness of their message; the Hymowitzes and Kimmels of the world want men to assume their traditional gender roles while letting women take on whatever role they want:

The patriarchal kinship system that demanded paternal investment was dismantled by feminists, technology and the legal system. It was replaced with a system that gave women control over virtually all aspects of reproduction, and where a woman could rest assured that the state would step in and provide for her children in the absence of a husband or father. Divorce, most often initiated by women, offered a way for women to seize control of their families at-will, even when a man had chosen to make a paternal investment. Men had become peripheral players in the lives of their offspring, and they could be cut from the team by coach mom at any time. The managing bureaucrat would then determine what role the father would have in his children’s lives—at best he might be offered a co-parenting role, at worst he could be reduced to a mere paycheck.

America may not yet be a matriarchy, but her family structure has become matrilineal, or at least matrifocal. The practice of giving a child his or her father’s surname is a vestigial gesture, an outdated social norm from an earlier time. If women were to stop doing it altogether, or if they were to insist that their names come first in a mother-hyphen-father configuration, any enduring illusion of patriarchy would be shattered. One has to wonder if, in the absence of that illusion, men would invest in fatherhood at all. The switch to a bonobo culture—where males are mere inseminators and helpers—would at that point be explicit and complete. Why wouldn’t men simply shuffle about alone or in small, impotent groups, playing games and seeking masturbatory short-term gratification? Why would they make the investment or the sacrifices necessary to be good husbands and fathers, when a woman could take it all away on a whim?

None of the scolds have managed to come up with a plan for getting young “guys” to stop drinking, hooking up or playing video games, and start families instead. All they’ve managed to do in exhorting men to “man up” is invoke the “musty script” of a patriarchal system that no longer exists.

The final chapter, “Misrepresenting Masculinity,” deconstructs the attempts of male feminists like Robert Brannon to redefine and muddy the concept of manliness. Buttressing Jack’s arguments are a mountain of citations, providing a great jumping-off point for those writing about feminism or masculinity. In a thoughtful touch, the PDF and Kindle versions of the book are organized differently, with the citations organized as footnotes in the PDF version and as endnotes in the Kindle one.

No Man’s Land could have used tighter editing: for example, Jack misspells “Michael” so many times I started to feel like the annoying pedants who come out of the woodwork every time I use the word “irregardless.” But still, you can’t argue with free, so get over to his website and get this book now.

Click here to download No Man’s Land, and don’t forget to kick Jack a few bucks via the PayPal button in the site’s sidebar.

Read Next: The Way of Men by Jack Donovan

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on November 22, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

The sad thing about true geniuses in the literary/art world is that their genius usually isn’t recognized until after they’re dead or otherwise unable to turn a profit on it. Philip K. Dick is the poster boy for this sort of thing, as he labored most of his life in utter poverty and died in his early fifties just months before the first film adapted from his work (Blade Runner) was released to theaters. Now nearly three decades later, Hollywood is rushing to adapt every goddamn thing he ever wrote into a movie: Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau, the list goes on. Not to mention all the other films that were inspired by Dick either directly or indirectly (Vanilla Sky, The Matrix, Inception etc.)

Most genre fiction is trash, and the nerd-dominated genres of science fiction and fantasy are the worst of all. The basis of all entertaining fiction is writing what you know and making sure what you know is interesting. The nerds who dominate sci-fi can’t produce anything but garbage because they don’t grasp this, substituting character development and plot for masturbatory exposition and futuristic gimmickry pulled out of their asses. There’s no verisimilitude or ethos, which is why most nerd fiction rings hollow. For instance, I can’t think of a single memorable novel or character by Asimov, Heinlein, or Herbert that stuck with me after I read the last page, and years afterwards, everything those tedious, overpraised failures wrote has slipped down the memory hole for good.

Dick sticks with me. Philip K. Dick stands alone among sci-fi writers as being worth reading, because he doesn’t use sci-fi elements to prop up bad storytelling; he doesn’t need to. His stories and characters stand on their own as being poignant and memorable. Dick’s milieu was the rapidly-changing social landscape of mid-century California, caught between the free-love hippies on the coast and the hateful, miserable Calvinists in the suburbs, Nixon’s “silent majority.” His writing is rooted in this conflict, along with his understanding of the nature of reality and his drug use, with the science fiction element nothing but glorified drapery. Dick saw modern Calvinist conservatism in its larval stages—its fixation on “law and order,” its willful ignorance, its hatred of beauty and glorification of ugliness—and feared it.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is one of his finest works in this vein, and one of my favorite novels. The setting is pure Dick, a futuristic police state America that is slowly liberalizing. Think the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. Radical college students are condemned to live in poverty in collective camps. Blacks have been given a ridiculous amount of social status after a eugenics program designed to ethnically cleanse them was reversed; early on, while driving through Los Angeles, a hotel clerk muses about how he would get the death penalty if he ran a black person over:

“They’re like the last flock of whooping cranes,” the clerk said, starting forward now that the old black had reached the far side. “Protected by a thousand laws. You can’t jeer at them; you can’t get into a fistfight with one without risking a felony rap – ten years in prison. Yet we’re making them die out – that’s what Tidman wanted and I guess what the majority of Silencers wanted, but” – he gestured, for the first time taking a hand off the wheel – “I miss the kids. I remember when I was ten and I had a black boy to play with…not far from here as a matter of fact. He’s undoubtedly sterilized by now.”

“But then he’s had one child,” Jason pointed out. “His wife had to surrender their birth coupon when their first and only child came…but they’ve got that child. The law lets them have it. And there’re a million statutes protecting their safety.”

“Two adults, one child,” the clerk said. “So the black population is halved every generation. Ingenious. You have to hand it to Tidman; he solved the race problem, all right.”

Our hero is Jason Taverner, a popular TV talk show host who, after surviving a murder attempt by his mistress, wakes up in a run-down hotel to discover that all evidence of his existence has been wiped from the Earth. His IDs are gone, his friends don’t recognize him, and his name is nowhere to be found in the government’s databases. And in a world where you’re asked “Papers, please,” every other mile, being a nonperson is a one-way trip to the gulag.

On the run from the law, Taverner hooks up with Kathy, an ID forger and police informer with a batshit crazy streak. In the process, he catches the eye of LAPD chief Felix Buckman; thinking that Taverner is some kind of high-level government agent, Buckman has the police track him down. Taverner himself flees to Las Vegas to hide out with Ruth Rae, an Elizabeth Taylor-esque has-been actress with fifty ex-husbands. Cornered by the cops, Taverner is taken back to L.A. to be interrogated by Buckman and subsequently falls under the wing of his sister Alys, a slutty, drug using bisexual who has an incestuous relationship with her brother. Alys also happens to be the only person in the world who knows who Jason Taverner is.

Flow My Tears is one hell of a riveting book, but there’s one chapter that particularly resonated with me, the chapter that most clearly elucidates Dick’s anti-Calvinist sentiments. Near the midway point of the novel, police are ransacking Ruth Rae’s apartment building looking for Taverner when they come across a Mr. Mufi, a fat, pathetic slob with a predilection for pubescent boys. While preparing to cuff him, the corporal on duty discovers that Mufi’s paramour is thirteen years old, and that as part of a campaign to take all victimless crimes off the books, the age of consent has been lowered to twelve. Frustrated that they can’t legally charge him with anything, the police leave the cowardly bastard with this:

“I hope,” the corporal said, “that someday you do commit a statute violation of some kind, and they haul you in, and I’m on duty the day it happens. So I can book you personally.” He hawked, then spat on Mr. Mufi. Spat into his hairy, empty face.

If that paragraph doesn’t sum up mainstream Calvinist conservatism—unknowing, unthinking, with no higher principles than the desire to be the topper in the cell block of American society, getting off on raping the already weak and despised—I don’t know what does. Dick even makes it clear who he’s talking about when he describes the carpet in Mr. Mufi’s living room as “depict[ing] in gold Richard M. Nixon’s final ascent into heaven amid joyous singing above and wails of misery below.”

If there’s one criticism I’d level at Flow My Tears, the narrative sort-of disintegrates in the final third. The ultimate plot twist is relatively weak by Dickian standards, and the action doesn’t really build to a climax, instead plodding along to its conclusion. The book also never explains the backstory of Felix and Alys’ relationship; they have a son, Barney, who apparently grows up to be a normal man, not suffering the physical and mental retardation you’d expect the child of siblings to have. It’s not important to the story, but I found it a bit odd. Still, I’d recommend Flow My Tears as a great introduction to the only good science fiction writer of the past century.

Click here to buy Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

Read Next: No Tears for Dead Sluts; or, Why I Have No Sympathy for Felicia Garcia

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on November 16, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

Four years of college taught me that not only does the ivory tower have no idea what makes good literature, they couldn’t care less; they’ll erase truly talented writers from the history books if they wander off the plantation. Case in point: the 20th century’s most reviled and imitated novelist, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Ask an English professor about Céline and half of them will have no idea who you’re talking about, and the other half will react like you just snapped off a Hitler salute. I still remember how my junior year Early American Lit professor reacted when I told her I was reading Rigadoon: “Wasn’t Céline a Nazi?”

I may be biased on this front, but Céline is arguably the finest Western novelist of the past hundred years. With the publication of this, his debut novel, in 1931, Leon Trotsky wrote that Céline “had walked into the pantheon of great literature like a man walks into his living room.” But with the rise of Nazi Germany, Céline made the fatal error of becoming a fascist, and like magic, he was suddenly a non-person in the world of books. Of course, he wasn’t alone in joining the losing team; Ezra Pound gave anti-Semitic propaganda speeches on Italian radio and was arrested for treason when the war ended. But Pound is still taught in the universities while Céline is a leper.

Don’t give me the argument that it’s because of Pound’s influence on literature, because Céline was just as influential if not more. Numerous writers up to the present day have mimicked or outright ripped off the bad doctor, from the good (Bukowski, Miller, Burroughs, Houellebecq) to the awful (Kesey, Heller, Vonnegut). It’s not hard to see why when you pick up Journey to the End of the Night. Like Mark Twain, the first great American novelist, Céline is less of a formal writer than a storyteller: he pulls you into his world as assuredly as your best friend bragging about the crazy adventures he had last night. His prose explodes with energy and life, never shying away from the dirty details, holding you captive in its grotesque grip. So the quality of Céline’s writing has nothing to do with his being blacklisted from the curriculum.

Nope, the reason why Pound is still loved and Céline is hated is because the latter was honest. Like all popular hacks, Pound was a better entrepreneur than a writer, a charmer who knew how to say all the right things at all the right times. Like the trendy lefties who lined up to root for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War while they were disemboweling Catholic priests, Pound converted to fascism because he thought they were the winning side, then staged a public repentance to avoid having to face a firing squad. Céline, the poor sincere bastard, never surrendered to the jeering hordes. An open supporter of the Vichy regime and author of anti-Semitic pamphlets, Céline wore his convictions on his sleeve even when public opinion shifted against them. He went to the grave without apologizing for or recanting anything he’d ever written.

But more than that, Céline is persona non grata in the literary world because he alone confronted the nihilism and emptiness of the post-WWI West. Oh sure, Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrote about the aimlessness of the Lost Generation, but they were strictly amateur hour, bedtime stories for the kids. Céline was dead serious. His books were glorified accounts of his own life, with the boring bits taken out and new details added in. In Journey to the End of the Night, he grabs you by the back of the neck, shoves your face in it and doesn’t let go.

Journey begins with Céline’s protagonist, Ferdinand Bardamu, shooting the breeze with his buddy in 1910′s Paris. Bardamu joins in a passing military parade to mock his patriotic countrymen, and ends up being drafted into the war. Deserting the front lines, he flees into the jungles of French colonial Africa to escape punishment. Bardamu’s bizarre odyssey takes him all the way to New York City, Detroit to work for Ford and fall in love with a prostitute, and finally back to France where he establishes a medical practice caring for poor Parisians who are always looking for ways to cheat him. Along the way, he is continuously dogged by Robinson, an off-and-on-again friend whose own escapades never end happily.

By Célinean standards, Journey is mild stuff, a gateway drug for his later nihilism. As is the nature of geniuses, however, even his less-exemplary works are miles ahead of everyone else. The translation by Ralph Manheim does a fantastic job of preserving the unpretentiousness and humor of the original French, as shown by the excerpt where Bardamu runs into a communal toilet in New York:

Men among men, all free and easy, they laughed and joked and cheered one another on, it made me think of a football game. The first thing you did when you got there was take off your jacket, as if in preparation for strenuous exercise. This was a rite and shirtsleeves were the uniform.

In that state of undress, belching and worse, gesticulating like lunatics, they settled down in the fecal grotto. The new arrivals were assailed with a thousand revolting jokes while descending the stairs from the street, but they all seemed delighted.

The morose aloofness of the men on the street above was equaled only by the air of liberation and rejoicing that came over them at the prospect of emptying their bowels in tumultuous company.

The splotched and spotted doors to the cabins hung loose, wrenched from their hinges. Some customers went from one cell to another for a little chat, those waiting for an empty seat smoked heavy cigars and slapped the backs of the obstinately toiling occupants, who sat there straining with their heads between their hands. Some groaned like wounded men or women in labor. The constipated were threatened with ingenious tortures.

Of course, a true artist like Ezra Pound would never have written about something as plebeian and low-class as the sight of Americans straining to shit in a public restroom. But that was the reality of post-WWI West: it was Shit World, everywhere, and Céline chronicled it like no writer before or after. In a way, I’m thankful that “respectable” people don’t dare touch Céline; it makes it easier for me to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s the reverse of the Hunter Thompson Idiot Test; anyone who likes Céline is usually intelligent and worth paying attention to, even if I disagree with them.

One thing that annoys me about this edition of Journey is the glossary. Céline’s writing was steeped in the vernacular of interwar France, and he frequently employed wordplay that doesn’t accurately translate into English. For example, in an early part of the book where Bardamu is recovering in an army hospital, he shares a room with a Sergeant Branledore, whose name is derived from branler, the French verb “to masturbate.” Instead of using footnotes, this edition forces you to flip to the back of the book whenever you come across an asterisked term. But this is a minor ding and won’t stop you from enjoying yourself.

Click here to buy Journey to the End of the Night.

Read Next: A Dead Bat in Paraguay: One Man’s Peculiar Journey Through South America by Roosh V

This is the worst book I’ve ever read.

I first heard of Killing Yourself to Live during my stay in Seattle: a guy who picked me up while hitchhiking told me that he was retracing the journey Chuck Klosterman took across America, investigating the spots where various rock stars died, and his next stop was the mansion where Kurt Cobain blew his brains out with a shotgun. It sounded like a cool book, so I instinctively threw it on my Amazon Wish List. Sometime later, I came across Mark Ames’ scathing review of Klosterman’s previous book, Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs, which opens with one of the most vicious descriptions of a human being ever written in the English language:

Klosterman is, quite simply and almost literally, an ass. His soft, saggy face bears a disturbing resemblance to a 50-year-old man’s failing, hairless back end. His tiny, red mouth is a sphincter twisting to a pained close 40 seconds after taking a brutal pounding from Peter North. To round it out, he has a mop of ironically uncombed, dyed-yellow hair and thick-rimmed glasses that look like they were placed on the ass as a frat prank, like a wig and sunglasses thrown on an old jack-o-lantern.

Ouch. To me, though, the most striking part of Klosterman’s (who I will be referring to as “Klosterfuck” for the rest of this review) appearance is his eyes. Everyone who’s ever lived in Portland or Brooklyn can recognize those eyes. It’s the empty, bovine stare of the hipster, a pose they think makes them look pensive but really makes them look like invalids on disability who got lost while going to meet their pot dealer.

As I mentioned already, the premise of Killing Yourself to Live is that Klosterfuck goes on a road trip across America visiting the spots where various rock stars died—such as the aforementioned Seattle mansion where Kurt Cobain shot himself, or the field in Mississippi where Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crashed—attempting to discover “why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing.” Along the way, he meets a menagerie of people from all walks of life. In the hands of a competent writer, this would make for a good story. In Chuck Klosterfuck’s hands, the narrative gets subsumed into a whiny memoir about how awesome Chuck Klosterfuck is.

He sums up the book at the beginning of the second chapter: “Fuck, man. This shit is complicated.” Ya think?

Killing Yourself to Live is written in a style that I can only describe as “pedantic ignorance.” Klosterfuck doesn’t just know nothing about rock, he’s proud of it. He has no curiosity, no desire to learn, and can’t even be bothered to hide his contempt for the musicians he writes about and their fans. The first chapter sets the book’s tone: Klosterfuck is sent by Spin magazine to the Hotel Chelsea to write about Sid Vicious and his murder of Nancy Spungen back in 1978. I want you to put yourself in his shoes for a minute. Even if you have zero knowledge about journalism and reporting, you can probably figure out how to carry out an assignment like this. What would you do?

a) Call the hotel’s manager ahead of time and ask to schedule an interview.

b) Track down employees who worked there when the murder happened and interview them.

c) Do some basic research about the murder at the library and/or on the Internet.

d) All of the above.

e) Show up uninvited, have a banal conversation with the front desk clerks, then get kicked out by the manager for being an annoying twerp. And sulk about it later.

If you picked anything other than “e,” sorry, but you just don’t have the chops to do what Chuck Klosterfuck does. I’m not kidding you: the guy arrives at the Chelsea having done no research or preparation, so he doesn’t even know that Room 100, where the murder went down, had been demolished nearly twenty years before. The rest of the chapter is filled with snide jabs at his subjects: Vicious is “moronic,” Spungen is “the most annoying human of the late 20th century,” and punk rock itself is “patently ridiculous.”

This sets up the pattern for the rest of the book: Klosterfuck goes to a rock star’s death site, makes a few trite observations and does nothing else. He drives to the graveyard in Rhode Island commemorating the Station nightclub fire, snorts a couple bumps of cocaine and eats dinner at Arby’s. He tries to go to the site of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crash but pusses out when he learns about the poisonous snakes that live in the area. He walks out to the bean field in Iowa where Buddy Holly’s plane went down, bitching the entire way. In between, the book is puffed up with lengthy descriptions of his girl problems, lengthy descriptions of the restaurants he eats at, and lengthy tangents on nothing at all.

Like every other mainstream literary author, Klosterfuck can’t write to save his life. He tries to mask his quotidian thoughts by overwriting and repeating himself again and again, stretching what should be throwaway observations into page-long soliloquies. For example, he spends half of the second chapter agonizing over what to bring with him on his trip. Not only that, Klosterfuck has an obnoxious habit of dragging the reader down paths and thoughts that lead absolutely nowhere. Take this paragraph describing a waitress he meets in North Carolina:

My Cracker Barrel waitress is more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Actually, that’s not true; my Cracker Barrel waitress is an ectomorphic 19-year-old woman with a semi-tragic haircut and slightly big teeth. However, by the time our four-minute conversation ends, I will be in love with her.

If the waitress isn’t more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor, then why the fuck did you say she was? Answer: to waste the reader’s time. And this is one of the more bearable examples; Klosterfuck can stretch these dead-end digressions out for pages. Just before this, he goes on a hypochondriac rant about how his colleagues at Spin would react if he were to drop dead. He caps it off with this middle finger to the reader:

At the moment, nobody in New York knows that I’m dead. And this is because I am not.

Speaking of Cracker Barrel, Klosterfuck has a sick fetish for chain restaurants; he name-drops them so often he comes off like an Aspergery Thomas Friedman. And like everything else in the book, his reasons for liking them are the dumbest, tritest crap imaginable. He spends two pages jacking off over Olive Garden (which “always makes [him] happy”) and sums up his love of Cracker Barrel in two sentences:

Cracker Barrel is sublime: You can order chicken and dumplings with a side order of dumplings. That’s advanced.

Holy shit, that’s INCREDIBLE! What amazing innovations will the restaurant industry come up with next? Free drink refills? Letting you substitute French fries with a side salad?

But Klosterfuck goes from stupid to downright creepy when he starts crying about his sex life. The guy makes a big deal about supposedly juggling three girlfriends: his “urban hippie” Spin colleague Diane, Midwestern souvenir shop owner Lenore, and one-time 420 buddy Quincy. His attempt at manly bona fides collapses completely when you realize he has all the charisma of an incel:

It gets worse because Diane’s inability to love me makes me love her more. Without a doubt, not loving me is the most alluring thing Diane (or any woman) can do. Nothing makes me love Diane as much as her constant rejection of my heartfelt advances. This is compounded by Diane’s own insecurities; the fact that she can reject me time after time after time is what she finds most endearing. She knows I will never give up. She could hate me and I would love her anyway.

Holy crap, I think I just discovered the Anti-Game Equation. Klosterfuck behaves exactly like the “Nice Guy” caricature that feminists complain about, right down to the servile boot-licking and entitlement. And naturally, the idea that Diane simply doesn’t find Klosterfuck attractive never crosses his mind. While taking her to a campout near Syracuse, our heterosexual hero decides he’s had enough of Diane’s headgames and puts his foot down:

“I can’t handle this anymore,” I say. “I have been very clear about my feelings toward you. I have run out of ways to say I love you. So this is it. You have three weeks.”

“I have three weeks to do what?”

“You have three weeks to decide if you want to be with me. And if your answer is that you do not want to be with me, I don’t want to hang out with you, ever.”

Silence.

“Chuck, I can’t guarantee that I will be able to answer that question.”

“You have to.”

“This is unfair.”

“I don’t care.”

Silence.

Man, Diane is one heartless bitch. What woman wouldn’t fall in love with a navel-gazing narcissist who talks like a teenage girl? I just can’t understand why she doesn’t see what a catch Chuck Klosterfuck is, this vagina-faced little troll who hovers around her incessantly, spends his free time hanging out with high school kids and is completely incompetent at his job.

Klosterfuck’s cluelessness around women first amused me, then became progressively more horrifying. The sad thing is that he actually seems aware of how repulsive he comes off to girls. Not enough to change his behavior, of course, but enough to refuse to inform us of the details of “Chuck’s 9/11,” a party where he disgusted Lenore so much she decided to break off their relationship for good. This little factoid doesn’t stop the Chuckster from driving to her rural Minnesota hometown in a last desperate attempt to Compliment & Cuddle his way into her panties:

“Why didn’t you tell me you loved me?” she asks by the lake. “It’s on the second page of your book, but you never actually said it to me. Not even once.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “I told you I loved you seven times.” This is technically accurate but intellectually fraudulent; I’ve told Lenore I loved her on seven occasions, but three times were in handwritten letters, three times were in e-mails, and once was when I was drunk.

Still, I was never lying.

At this point, Klosterfuck is batting 0 for 3; he spends the night before in Minneapolis repeatedly dialing Quincy without getting a response. He whiles away the time getting drunk with his frenemy My Nemesis (no really, that’s what he calls him), who he claims to “love” despite half of their encounters ending in sissy slap-fights:

…My Nemesis—who was probably my closest friend at the time—used this irrelevant alternative publication as a vehicle to publicly attack me. I responded poorly to this. It prompted me to drive back to Grand Forks, drink about 27 beers, and punch him in the face in front of all our friends.

Noticing a pattern here? ‘Cause I sure am. If Klosterfuck ever said he loved me, I’d immediately file a restraining order: “Forney had used his irrelevant blog as a means to publicly impugn my honor. I did not take the news well. I was inspired to take a four-hour flight to Portland, wait in the bushes outside his house, and crack him in the knees with a Louisville Slugger. I celebrated afterwards with a feast at Carl’s Jr. I fucking love their Jim Beam Bourbon Burgers.”

And almost as soon as he’s done bragging about that pussy punch, Klosterfuck revokes his own man card. Driving to meet up with his parents in their rural North Dakota town, he starts talking about the time his brother Bill shot a buck at 250 yards. He explains his own reluctance to hunt with this boner:

Men shoot animals, and I am just a Guy.

Dude, just stick your head in the oven and get it over with. And by the way, when your mother calls you a “bugger,” she’s implying that you like to suck big dicks.

And we haven’t even hit maximum creep yet. That comes in Missoula, Montana. After spending twenty minutes desperately freebasing the last of his weed with his car’s cigarette lighter, Klosterfuck discovers that a group of high schoolers are partying in the hotel room next door. He strikes up a conversation with one of the girls, and when she realizes that he’s higher than the Pope, she asks if she can buy some. Instead of simply telling her the truth, he gives her a bizarre lecture on why marijuana’s bad, mmmkay, ending with this:

“Right on,” she says unconvincingly. We exchange terse good-byes, and then she walks back into her room. I can hear three teenagers groan through the wooden door. They are so not going to party.

It’s that last line that clinches it. Klosterfuck thinks he’s being witty—several paragraphs back, he notes the teenagers repeating “We are so going to party”—but combined with his pedo-esque face and bunny-boiling antics, I imagined Chris Hansen kicking the door down and asking him to take a seat.

And the worst part about Klosterfuck’s failed sexcapades? They’re the only times in the book where he is even semi-honest.

Everything else in Killing Yourself to Live is a fake, phony posture. Klosterfuck throws out statements and opinions not to advance arguments or find the truth, but to mock underground culture and everyone who ever took it seriously, playing Principal Skinner to an audience of empty-headed GenX/millennial trust fund brats. Whenever he name-drops an avant-garde or underground musician, it’s to either insult them (as he did with Sid Vicious) or compare them unfavorably to the commercialized, mindless dreck he enjoys. He picks Radiohead over Pavement, Motley Crue over David Byrne, KISS over Lou Reed (even going so far as to compare his recent “girlfriends” to the members of KISS), and Guns ‘n’ Roses over Nirvana.

That last one is the most galling of all. Kurt Cobain, whatever his flaws, was a serious man who lived what he preached. In other words, he was everything that Chuck Klosterfuck is not. So naturally, when he gets to Seattle, Klosterfuck engages in some revisionist history that should have indie rock fans screaming for a fatwa on his head:

…Nevermind was no longer the soundtrack to living in the early ’90s—now it was that experience in totality. Kurt Cobain had not merely made culturally important music— suddenly, he had made culture. His death became a catchall event for anyone who wanted their adolescence to have depth: It was now possible to achieve credibility simply by mourning retrospectively. Cobain’s iconography hadn’t changed that much, really; what changed was the number of people who suddenly thought Cobain’s iconography said something about themselves.

In other words: “Ha ha you dumbfucks, Cobain’s suicide didn’t really mean anything!” All those angst-filled lyrics raging against the world? All the times Cobain said he was upset at corporations co-opting his music? Naming his band after a philosophical concept that refers to the peace of mind that comes with liberation from the lies of the material world? It was all bullshit! Cobain was just a deluded, depressed junkie.

The only real music comes from corporate hacks like Gene Simmons and Axl Rose who pander to the lowest common denominator.

That’s the endgame of the bland, Beigeist liberalism that Klosterfuck represents: a world in which nothing is at stake. Where marijuana is the only permissible drug. Where sex is negotiated through consent forms signed in triplicate. Where Olive Garden and their half-cooked McItalian cuisine is considered the height of American dining. Where there’s no danger, no risk and no passion. Where no one takes a stand on anything because believing in something is rubbish, and rubbish isn’t cool. Stuff and shit is cool.

I can already hear all the little Klosterfuckers upset at this review: “God Matt, it’s just MUSIC, why you gotta take everything so SERIOUSLY? You need to chill out and smoke a joint or something.”

Chuck Klosterfuck and his ilk are the real-life Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends: soulless, sophomoric, shallow and stupid. Smiling to your face while they stab you in the back. Haters of everything good, beautiful and moral in this world. And I’m going to keep kicking against these pricks until the loathsome culture they created is six feet under.

In the meantime, toss self-indulgent, revisionist garbage like Killing Yourself to Live in the trash can where it belongs.

Click here to buy Killing Yourself to Live.

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