Category Archives: Books/Media

Postmodern writing is almost entirely garbage. The linguistic trickery of writers like Jonathan Safran Foer and David Foster Wallace—piles of footnotes, frequent tone shifts, dialect writing, making the ending of your novel a fucking flipbook—is a mirage to disguise their limp prose and limper view of reality. Infinite Jest is a Calvinist anti-drug morality tale disguised as edgy, avant-garde literature; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a mawkish Hallmark movie in print format.

So you can imagine that I really wasn’t looking forward to reading House of Leaves.

It’s the kind of book I ordinarily wouldn’t bother with at all; I only read it because my friend Zampano (who took his alias from the novel’s central character) urged me to. And while I won’t claim that House of Leaves blew my socks off or anything, for a postmodern novel, it’s actually pretty good. Interwoven in the countless footnotes and citations of Mark Z. Danielewski’s book is an intriguing story of love, discovery and madness, one worth reading.

As I mentioned, House of Leaves concerns itself with Zampanò, recently deceased hermit, ladies’ man and dissident academic. The story is presented through the text of Zampanò’s posthumously published masterpiece The Navidson Record, a book-length dissection of a supposed documentary film of the same name. The narrative of The Navidson Record is intertwined with that of Johnny Truant, a tattoo artist and perpetual washout who takes it upon himself to edit Zampanò’s book and release it for publication:

He stopped. We had reached the door. Now I shudder. Back then, I think I was elsewhere. More than likely daydreaming about Thumper. This will probably really wig you out, I don’t care, but one night I even rented Bambi and got a hard-on. That’s how bad I had it for her. Thumper was something else and she sure beat the hell out of Clara English. Perhaps at that moment I was even thinking about what the two would look like in a cat fight. One thing’s for sure though, when I heard Lude turn the bolt and open Zampanò’s door, I lost sight of those dreams.

The various threads of House of Leaves’ plot—the Navidson family, Johnny Truant and Zampanò himself—are melded together in a seamless fashion, with Truant and Zampanò’s story taking the form of footnotes inserted with Navidson’s text. The book takes advantage of the medium of print to pull maneuvers that are currently impossible with e-books, from color-coding certain words (“house,” for example, is always colored blue) to arranging paragraphs in ways that simulate the ongoing action to utilizing strikethroughs and bolded Xs to highlight areas where Zampanò’s original text was lost. For example, a paragraph in which a character is ascending a staircase is split out across several pages, each one containing only a handful of words. The book is further bolstered by a references section shedding further light on Truant and Zampanò’s lives.

It sounds gimmicky, but these various elements just mesh in a way that fiction of this type usually doesn’t.

The main problem with House of Leaves is its bland central narrative. The Navidson Record is an academic analysis of a documentary film (that doesn’t exist, either in the real world or the book’s world) about a family who moves into a house only to discover that it’s larger on the inside than the outside. This should be a gripping tale, as it encompasses the Navidson family coping with whatever malevolent force haunts their home, delves into the infidelities of Will Navidson’s wife Karen, and unfolds slowly like a good thriller. The problem is that Danielewski writes this portion of the book in a faux-scholarly style, which combined with the odd page layouts makes getting through The Navidson Record a chore:

So much so that back in October when Navidson first came across the tape of Wax kissing Karen he hardly responded. He viewed the scene twice, once at regular speed, the second time on fast forward, and then moved on to the rest of the footage without saying a word. From a dramatic point of view we must realize it is a highly anticlimactic moment, but one which, as the Haven-Slocum Theory argues, only serves to further emphasize the level of damage the house had already inflicted upon Navidson: “Normal emotional reactions no longer apply. The pain anyone else would have felt while viewing that screen kiss, in Navidson’s case has been blunted by the grossly disproportionate trauma already caused by the house. In this regard it is in fact a highly climactic, if irregular moment, only because it is so disturbing to watch something so typically meaningful rendered so utterly inconsequential. How tragic to find Navidson so bereft of energy, his usual snap and alacrity of thought replaced by such unyielding torpor. Nothing matters anymore to him, which as more than a handful of people have already observed, is precisely the point.”

Danielewski’s relatively basic writing skills don’t help, either. House of Leaves was his first novel and it shows: while there’s nothing technically wrong with his prose, he doesn’t write anything that takes you aback or leaps out at you. According to Zampano (my friend, not the novel’s Zampanò), Danielewski’s follow-up novels were all garbage, suggesting he either got lucky with this one or stole the idea from a degenerate he met in rehab.

So what makes House of Leaves worth reading if the bulk of it is dull pseudo-academic drudgery?

Answer: Johnny Truant’s story. Danielewski shines when he relates the struggles of Truant to piece together Zampanò’s manuscript, his pining for his stripper girlfriend Thumper, and his adventures with his buddy Lude. Truant progressively goes insane as the novel advances, culminating in a desperate search for the Navidson’s house, fact and fiction blending together in his increasingly addled mind. Unlike most postmodern novelists, Danielewski actually seems like he’s had sex and used drugs, giving Truant’s tale both realism and verisimilitude. He may be nuts, but he’s a charming kind of nuts.

That’s why you should read House of Leaves. Beneath its pile of contradictory footnotes (Zampanò’s and Truant’s footnotes are noted in different fonts), its bizarre text layouts and the dullness of its central story, there’s a rich mystery waiting to be solved. It’s unfortunate that Danielewski couldn’t keep the quality consistent throughout the novel, but what’s there is intriguing, original and worth checking out.

Click here to buy House of Leaves.

Read Next: Naughty Nomad: Not Your Typical Backpacker Story by Mark Zolo

The idea that popular fiction is a reflection of the zeitgeist is a ludicrously trite statement, but it bears repeating from time to time. Sherlock Holmes was a product of late Victorian hypocrisy and prissiness; Mike Hammer titillated the repressed families of post-World War II America with sex and sleaze; Stephen King spins classic horror tales for a postmodern audience. With that in mind, what do we make of Leslie Charteris’ character Simon Templar (aka the Saint) and his series of crime thrillers?

 Answer: they were written for a world in decay.

While the Saint novels aren’t terribly shocking by modern standards, awash as we are in tales of morally compromised antiheroes, Charteris’ books were relatively novel by the standards of interwar Britain. Simon Templar is a blend of Robin Hood and Mike Hammer, dispensing justice to the wicked outside the confines of the law. Despised by Scotland Yard just as much as the criminals he fought, the Saint’s adventures were the perfect brand of escapism for the post-World War I West. The moral sureties and optimism of the Belle Epoque washed away in the trenches of Verdun, the rudderless peoples of Europe and the U.S. sought to fill the gaping hole with whatever came along.

The Saint novels weren’t simply about thrilling mysteries and high adventure, they were a direct attack on the failure of Western institutions. Simon Templar’s brand of vigilante justice was catnip to an audience that had lost faith in the structures of traditional society. Charteris, himself an outsider to British and American society (he was half-Chinese and born in Singapore), understood this better then other popular writers of the day.

For those interested in the Saint novels, Enter the Saint is a good place to start. The second volume in the Saint series (the first volume was disliked by Charteris himself and ignored in later books), it displays flashes of the brilliance that Charteris would bring to later installments. While imperfect, Enter the Saint is a breezy read, buoyed by Charteris’ keen eye for dialogue, action and social observation:

Hilloran had an inspiration. He couldn’t stop to give thanks for the marvelous coincidence that ha made the girl play straight into his hands. The thanksgiving could come later. The immediate thing was to leap for the heaven-sent opening. He took a sheet of paper from his pocket and leaned forward. “You remember me giving Dicky a letter yesterday evening before dinner?” he asked. “I opened it first and took a copy. Here it is. It looks innocent enough, but—“

Enter the Saint comprises three short stories: “The Man Who Was Clever,” “The Policeman with Wings,” and “The Lawless Lady.” The latter one is by far the weakest of the novellas, as it barely concerns Templar at all, instead focusing on his underling Dicky Tremaine. The first two, on the other hand, are well worth the price of admission, as they detail the efforts of the Saint and his merry band to take down a ring of drug smugglers:

The Saint felt the wind of the blow caress his face, and then a lightning left uppercut came rocketing up from his knees to impact on the point of Snake’s jaw, and Ganning was catapulted back into the arms of his attendant Boys.

While Charteris’ prose in Enter the Saint is not as strong as in his later Saint novels, this book is still worth the buy if you enjoy action, mystery and adventure novels.

Click here to buy Enter the Saint.

Read Next: Enter the Diefenbunker: A Photo Essay

Mark Twain once defined a classic as a book that everyone praises and nobody reads. I’ve pissed off so many people in the past by dissing so-called “classic” works—Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby and everything by William Wordsworth, among others—for being poorly written, poorly plotted, or just flat-out fake. At best, some of these books were ideal for their time but have since been rendered irrelevant; at worst, the continued prominence of these “great” novels shows just how phony and idiotic most literary critics and educators are.

The Master and Margarita is one of these books.

To the middlebrow reader, Mikhail Bulgakov’s magnum opus is a moving love story that satirizes the atheistic idiocy of the Soviet Union. To anyone with a brain, it’s a bathetic piece of shit with a few decent moments. While Bulgakov’s satire shows flashes of genius from time to time, his over-dramatic prose, childlike moralizing and convoluted plotting make reading The Master and Margarita a dull chore. The only person who could possibly enjoy this book is a brain-dead conservative of the National Review school, the kind of person who enjoyed William Buckley’s Blackford Oakes thrillers and whines about Hollywood being too “lib-ruhl.”

Indeed, just about every aspect of The Master and Margarita reads like a poorly-done political polemic. Right-wingers who complain about the left-wing slant of the arts rarely consider that good artists, regardless of political orientation, don’t put their politics front and center. If a good work is leftist, it’s leftist by accident: the writer’s biases seep out like leaks in a bucket, not splashed on the reader like they’re getting hosed down in a concentration camp. When conservatives attempt to create ideological art, it fails for the same reason that all ideological art fails: nobody wants to be lectured to.

When you attempt to talk down to the reader, any enjoyment your book might provide is sucked out like a Thai single mother working overtime on Blow Row.

The Master and Margarita concerns its titular characters, an unnamed Russian author who has been tossed in a lunatic asylum after his novel about Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ was rejected by the atheistic communist literary establishment. We aren’t introduced to him or his despairing lover Margarita until halfway through the book, the first part focusing on the appearance of Woland (Satan’s avatar) in downtown Moscow, where he proceeds to wreak havoc everywhere he goes:

Trying to get hold of something, Berlioz fell backwards, the back of his head lightly striking the cobbles, and had time to see high up—but whether to right or left he no longer knew—the gold-tinged moon. He managed to turn on his side, at the same moment drawing his legs to his stomach in a frenzied movement, and, while turning, to make out the face, completely white with horror, and the crimson armband of the woman driver bearing down on him with irresistible force. Berlioz did not cry out, but around him the whole street screamed with desperate female voices.

I’m not sure whether this is a product of Bulgakov’s own writing or the ineptness of this translation, but The Master and Margarita’s tone rubbed me the wrong way right from the start. A book mocking the priggishness and parochialism of the 1930’s Moscow literati should be lighthearted and dismissive, but Bulgakov narrates like he’s transcribing The Epic of Gilgamesh, writing in a bombastic drama queen voice. Furthermore, the dialogue is written with the subtlety of a cannon shot, as Woland calmly walks up to Berlioz (the head of MASSOLIT, the Soviet writers’ guild) and his poet friend Ivan Homeless and argues with them about the existence of God.

These aren’t characters, they’re freaking right-wing ad libs.

Where the book really goes wrong is when its title characters enter the story. While I understand Bulgakov’s intentions—to depict a love so strong that not even the machinations of the State or the Devil can tear it apart—he goes about it all wrong. The relationship between the Master and Margarita is described in such florid, purple tones that I find it hard to believe that Bulgakov ever had sex in his life:

Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar’s vile tongue be cut out!

Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!

No! The master was mistaken when with bitterness he told Ivanushka in the hospital, at that hour when the night was falling past midnight, that she had forgotten him. That could not be. She had, of course, not forgotten him.

Were it not for the awkward translation phrasing, I’d swear the love story in The Master and Margarita had been stolen from one of those silent film melodramas. “And then the evil blackguard tied the fair maiden to the railroad tracks! As she screamed and screamed for help, our hero raced as fast as he could so that he might save her…”

Interjected every so often is The Master and Margarita’s B-plot, a fictionalized narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus. You have to be pretty goddamn arrogant to think you can improve on the Bible, and as expected, Bulgakov’s depiction of Jesus’ Yeshua’s persecution falls flat on its face. It’s fairly obvious that Bulgakov is trying to draw a parallel between Pilate and Stalin, but his heavy-handed treatment of the story—like everything else in the book—ruins any dramatic tension that might have otherwise developed.

To put it simply, The Master and Margarita is the literary equivalent of the Creation Museum: an attempt to combat aggressive stupidity with aggressive stupidity. It’s sentimental, overwrought, tacky and probably should have stayed in samizdat. Feel free this skip this “classic.”

Click here to buy The Master and Margarita.

Read Next: This Malignant Mirage by Andy Nowicki

The Turner Diaries is a book most people have heard of but few have read. It’s best remembered as the neo-Nazi pulp novel that inspired a half-dozen violent crimes by white supremacists and other anti-government terrorists, most notably the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995. I always liked Chip Smith’s take on it; years ago, he attempted to analyze William Luther Pierce’s “masterpiece” from a literary standpoint, describing the book as “masturbatory,” “contrived” and “the meanest goddamn book ever written.” The Turner Diaries depicts its Aryan heroes as flawless supermen and their enemies as impossibly evil, without a shade of nuance or complexity. Plus, in what universe does a guy named “Earl” ever amount to anything?

And since Chip Smith is the head of Nine-Banded Books, publisher of Tito Perdue’s satirical novel The Node, that provides the perfect segue for this review.

The Node isn’t merely a fantastic send-up of our sexualized, multiculturalist world, it’s a book-length goof on the self-appointed saviors of white, middle-class America, the perfect antidote to Pierce’s humorless onanism. Perdue asks the vital question that no one seems to be asking: how exactly is civilization going to be saved when its rescuers are just as incompetent and degenerate as the society they decry? How can those who have been poisoned by cultural Marxism—even if they’ve rejected some of its lies—be trusted to create a new societal paradigm?

Perdue doesn’t have any answers, but he deserves credit for even asking the questions to begin with.

Just a few days before I wrote this review, a friend of mine sent me a hilarious example of the kind of idiocy that the New Right produces. Basically, a middle-aged Mexican neo-Nazi (don’t ask me how that’s supposed to work) who lives with his parents decided that he could best help the white race by illegally immigrating to the U.K. with the help of a Brazilian he knew off the Internet. Anyone with a sex life could have pointed out how this was a bad idea, but Nazi Gonzales went through with it anyway… and ended up getting screwed over by his Brazilian benefactor in the most humiliating way possible. His Ray Midge-esque whining about having to sleep in a slum hostel with Jamaicans and carry his own luggage around London is made even funnier by his earlier panegyrics to Hitler and his proclamations on exterminating non-whites.

These are the kinds of people who call manospherians “degenerates”: socially maladjusted losers who fall for obvious scams.

The setting of The Node reads like a Philip K. Dick manuscript married with Idiocracy. In the far future, pretty much every godawful social trend of modern America has been played out to its conclusion. The U.S. has devolved into a collection of segregated cities, packed to the brim with sub-retarded ethnic minorities addicted to daytime TV and petty larceny. Whites are a despised and exploited minority, derisively referred to as “Cauks” (short for “Caucasian”). The environment has been completely destroyed, the countryside a hellscape of exploding volcanoes and perpetually overcast skies. The yuan has replaced the dollar as the currency of choice, men are routinely emasculated as a matter of course, and life is generally short and unpleasant:

She went to get it. Far away he saw an anorexic sipping at a cup of synthetic water and at the table next to her two basketball players from the former Namibia. A young boy, an Australasian he believed, was standing in the center showing off some of the new diseases. He was dressed in a T-shirt that pictured the moment of his own conception and no one who saw it could fail to be amused. Just across from him our pilgrim saw a pretty girl whose skirt covered much of her pubis and in places came down to her garter tops. And then, finally, he saw some other people as well.

The story follows an unnamed protagonist variously referred to as “our man,” “our boy,” “the novice” and “the pilgrim.” His placid life in rural Tennessee disrupted by a propane shortage, he journeys to the big city, stumbling across an enclave of whites known as a “Node.” He’s immediately welcomed in due to his stock of money and top-of-the-line “escrubilator” (a vaguely defined device that is mentioned every other page), quickly ascending through the Nodists’ quasi-religious structure and tasked with creating his own Node.

The ultimate goal of the Nodists? To create a new homeland for whites, where the mistakes of the past fifty years can finally be rectified.

The only problem with this is that the Nodists are an unlikable lot, a bunch of crabby old men with only the faintest recollection of life before everything went to hell. They’re unreliable drunks who frequently screw up, leaving “our man” to constantly bail them out of their own stupidity. Despite constantly talking about repopulating the Earth with whites, there are precious few young women in the Node to go around. Even worse, the Nodists have imbibed the moral code of the surrounding society:

She said nothing. Her hips were broad enough and she was in possession, he felt sure, of a birthing canal of just the right proportions. Her bosoms were in their places, too, and had a quality that caused him to refer visually to them from one moment to another. Here now was a woman who with but little effort could nurture one set of twins after another until the end of all. He even believed that he could perceive her nipples, appurtenances of about 4/10 an inch in length and as big around, almost, as an old-fashioned Chesterfield cigarette. He smiled at her in friendly fashion. They were passing just then an extensive structure called “The Wedge,” a containment center for people of ethnocentric tendencies. One glimpse of those towers and razor wire, the facilitators marching back and forth carrying blowguns over their shoulders… He preferred not to think of it.

Perdue isn’t just blasting white nationalists/separatists, he’s blasting every right-wing splinter group with dreams of grandeur about saving the world. Are you listening, neoreactionaries, the ones babbling about “Gnon” and “Elua” on Twitter? He’s talking about you. Dark Enlightenmentarians? He’s talking about you. Men’s rights’ activists? He’s talking about you. The Node is a blistering attack on every Napoleon complex-afflicted dork who’s never even kissed a girl yet writes detailed blog posts about the intellectual inferiority of blacks or fantasizes about slicing the U.S. into independent states. It’s a novel about what would actually happen if a bunch of Aspie monarchists really did found a reactionary commune in Idaho.

There are too many self-appointed generals on the New Right who aren’t even fit for the enlisted ranks.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though: Perdue expresses a bit of hope for the future of Western civilization. The second half of the novel concerns “our boy’s” attempts to carve a functioning society out of the post-apocalyptic wilderness. While Perdue leaves us with an ambiguous ending, he paints a portrait where possibly, just possibly, the Nodists’ philosophy might work out. It’ll just take a severe amount of work to get there.

The Node is propelled forward by Perdue’s minimalist prose. Reflecting his Southern origins, the novel is written in an erudite-yet-unpretentious style, the diction of a man who’s more intelligent than his vocabulary suggests. This tone works perfectly for the protagonist, who resembles the central figure of Dostoevsky’s Idiot in his childlike-yet-wise approach to life. While no one would call The Node a “laugh-out-loud” novel, there are several segments that had me chuckling.

The fact of the matter is that if you enjoy thought-provoking satire and aren’t afraid of having your sacred cows slaughtered, The Node is right up your alley. While the canon of “New Right” literature isn’t very large, it’s heartening to see self-criticism of the kind that Perdue is putting out. It indicates that this cultural movement, entity or whatever it is hasn’t lost its mind.

Click here to buy The Node.

Read Next: Work Out, Lose Weight and Stop Being Single by the Captain Power

Everything old is new again.

The older I get, the more I realize that the world really hasn’t changed at all. Feminism, cultural Marxism and multiculturalism are just the latest manifestations of spectres that have haunted humanity going back to the time of Ur. Humanity is locked in a perpetual circle of might and misery, reaching great highs and humiliating lows as predictably as a grandfather clock. Expecting most people to learn from their mistakes is pure folly, which is why wise men look to the great texts of yesteryear to discover where humanity has been.

In order to understand our future, we need to know our past.

That’s the thrust of Quintus Curtius’ debut book, Thirty Seven. A collection of essays both original and culled from his Return of Kings articles, Curtius tackles everything from history to literature to foreign languages with insight and wit. While somewhat thematically disconnected at points, Thirty Seven serves as not only a smart introduction to the classics of Western and world literature, but a compelling and thoughtful work in its own right.

Thirty Seven succeeds primarily because Curtius doesn’t simply regurgitate history and literature at you like a bored professor. He has that rarest of talents: the ability to take a work or story and expand upon it, probing themes and concepts that might not immediately come to you reading the work yourself. Whether he’s discussing the travails of Averroës, the medieval Islamic scholar, or retelling the story of John Paul Jones’ fall from grace, Curtius forces you to consider dimensions of life that may not have come to you on your own:

This implied the limitations of faith and the prerogatives of reason; and medieval man did not want to hear that faith had its limits, and was circumscribed by boundaries. Averröes’s books were suppressed by the secular authorities of his day. The caliph at Baghdad ordered his writings destroyed in 1150, and this edict was reissued by authorities in Seville in 1194. Most of his important writings were preserved only in Latin translation from the original Arabic; learned Jews translated some of his books into Hebrew, and thereby preserved additional Averröist legacies. In the universities of Paris and London, the debate over Averröism spread like wildfire in the Middle Ages, and stimulated the philosophic output of Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and countless others. But this debate was never really held in Islam. Speculative thought hid in fear from persecution, and retreated from the sunlight.

Thirty Seven features the same prose style that Curtius uses in his Return of Kings articles: authoritative, powerful, yet approachable, the voice of a wizened elder giving advice to the young’uns. While his writing gets a little too academic in spots, these speed bumps are minor: Thirty Seven makes its subject matter as approachable as it can possibly be. This combined with the brevity of most of the essays makes it possible to blow through the book pretty quickly.

Indeed, one of the greatest achievements of Thirty Seven is that it puts the classics into context. People blindly assume that books that have survived throughout the centuries are automatically good, hence Mark Twain’s riposte that a classic is a book that everyone praises and nobody reads. Curtius helps to contextualize philosophies of the past, such as Stoicism, by filling in the gaps as to how they came about:

Good disciplines to know also are literature, in that it forms good habits of virtue, and strengthens the memory by study. Rhetoric (the art of eloquence) and disputation are required also for being able to verbally spar with opponents in the inevitable contests that will confront any leader. Poetics is good for relaxation, mathematics and the sciences good for logical development, and languages for getting outside oneself.

The book isn’t all high-minded philosophy and history, however. A number of the essays deal with practical advice on learning foreign languages. As an experienced world traveler, Curtius offers some useful tips that run counter to the Rosetta Stone-esque junk that pervades the Internet today:

Daily commitment is necessary for cementing the structures and patterns of the language in your long-term memory. You need to be working at least 30 minutes per day, every day, for a few years. If you can’t handle this commitment, then you will not be successful. If you are studying more than one language at a time, make sure you use different desks or tables in your house or apartment. I learned this technique in a biography of Sir Richard Burton, an amazing 19th century British explorer and linguist. He had a separate desk in his house for each language he studied. The technique works: the mind tends to associate each different place with what is studied there. This speeds learning and prevents “linguistic interference” where one language interferes with another.

If I were to criticize the book for anything, it’s that Thirty Seven’s organization feels somewhat slipshod. While not as bad as, say, Captain Capitalism: Top Shelf, the book doesn’t seem to be assembled in a logical order. For example, the essays on foreign language learning aren’t lumped together as they should, but are strewn about the book. This might confuse readers who expect their books to contain a more cohesive line of reasoning.

However, this really isn’t that important. Thirty Seven is a rare gem: a book that truly, deeply educates you. It’s a book that expands your knowledge of life and the world, and does so in a way that is entertaining and never boring. It’s easily one of the most enlightening books I’ve read this year. Whether you’re curious about the classics or you want deep insights on the masculine condition, Thirty Seven belongs in your collection.

Click here to buy Thirty Seven.

Read Next: Life is Short and So is This Book: Brief Thoughts on Making the Most of Your Life by Peter Atkins

This book is the intellectual equivalent of being shoved feet-first into a meat grinder.

In Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker, Andy Nowicki’s first nonfiction title, he lays bare the chaos and conflict of his soul for all to jeer at. Nowicki’s numerous fiction works, from The Columbine Pilgrim’s psychological profile of spree shooters to Heart Killer’s erotic revenge story, all revolve around one central conceit: sex. Specifically, Nowicki’s characters exist with one foot in the material world and one in the spiritual: too depraved to be saints, too disgusted with themselves to be devils. From spinster therapists to wormy little priesthood rejects to middle-aged stalkers, the protagonists of Nowicki’s works are made and unmade by their carnal desires.

Now, we get a look at the thought processes of the man who created them.

Confessions bills itself as a “Manifesto,” but as Nowicki himself acknowledges in the opening, the book doesn’t have much of a call to action. Indeed, as the “would-be” qualifier stipulates, he doesn’t even consider himself worthy of joining his own cult. Confessions is more an apologia for Nowicki’s own beliefs and ideas than an attempt to convince people of their righteousness. It’s a glimpse inside the sausage factory of his mind, with Mr. Mackey as tour guide: “Fucking’s bad, mmmkay?”

Viewed in this light, Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker is a must-read.

The book is divided into two parts, the first of which, “Manning Down,” comprises the bulk of Confessions’ length. The story is a seamless melding of autobiographical anecdotes from Nowicki’s childhood merged with his tongue-in-cheek philosophy dividing the world into “wankers” and “fuckers.” The defining moment of his life was puberty, a psychological Rubicon that he was forced across at gunpoint:

But I didn’t refrain from actively engaging in the quest for romantic entanglement merely because I feared the pain and humiliation of rejection, though of course these bruising psychic contusions were far from unknown to me. The few times I fell in love with a girl and made my feelings known were of course doomed to end in this manner, since my taste was always for girls who were, as they say, “out of my league.” Though I’d been a beautiful boy in my (pre-sexual) early childhood, I’d grown ghastly, gawky, pale, spotty, and awkward by the time my teen years rolled around. Forcibly shoved to the bottom of the high school food chain, my carnal aesthetics nevertheless remained hopelessly elitist and aristocratic; girls who were likewise plain or slightly unsightly, as I was, would no doubt have agreed to my companionship. But alas, to paraphrase Woody Allen, the loins want only what they want, and can’t be convinced to settle for anything other than that perceived ideal.

Casual readers will note—and be shocked by—how much Nowicki has infused himself into his fiction. It’s one thing to read a novel about a bullied nerd who grows up to be a vicious murderer: it’s quite another to see the exact real-world events that made said bullied nerd such a convincing and poignant character. While some of Nowicki’s stories will not be too surprising (for example, he recounts how popular girls used to humiliate him in high school by mock-flirting with him), others will stun you; for example, I was initially floored by the section where he discusses his spiritual agnosticism.

Most of the “Manning Down” section is devoted to Nowicki’s inability to fit his square peg into the round hole of pubescence. While it would be easy to turn this kind of topic into a whiny blubber-fest, he deftly avoids bathos in favor of ruthless black comedy. The unifying theme of Confessions is the corruption that sex brings to human relations, how it inspires cruelty in its haves and cowardice in its have-nots. In one of the book’s more tragicomic sections, Nowicki discusses how his suffering at the hands of the popular girls so jaundiced him that he ended up rejecting a dweebette who actually was interested in him:

In any event, Suzanne showed up the next morning in a skimpy little frock, and sat down next to me. I didn’t look up. We dwelt together in silence for a long moment, and as the seconds ticked past, the blood coursed to my head once more, as it had the previous day; my heart thumped madly, and I wished to be anywhere in the world other than where I was. Presently Suzanne spoke: “I wore this dress just for you, Andy,” she said. Again with the silly sotto voce; again, the gratuitous repetition of my name. In response, I muttered something vaguely dismissive, causing her immediately to snap out of middle-school “sexy” mode and turn mortally offended. “Fine! Be that way!” she huffed, then got up and left.

It’s this hellscape of hormonal misery that forms the basis for Nowicki’s division of the world into “wankers” and “fuckers.” In his view, a wanker is a man who has realized that his sexual desires are a liability, not an asset. Fuckers are slaves to their biological impulses, flighty creatures who live and die by the approval of others, anything to slake their thirst for pleasure. A fucker can be easily controlled through the manipulation of his lusts, and indeed usually is. In contrast, the wanker seeks to impress no one, for he has nothing to gain by shucking and jiving for the benefit of the masses. Unable to return to the Christ-like state of childhood innocence, the wanker does the next best thing in refusing to kneel to the great god Pan:

In addition, the wanker is acutely aware that being sexual makes him vulnerable, even weak. It renders him easily exploitable. If a girl says she wants him, he feels elated, and the putty aching to escape his testes through his urethra reduces him to putty in her hands. A man who succumbs to flattery in this manner is a man enslaved; he is—properly speaking—no man at all, having lost his capacity to behave in a manner which denotes a free will. He has ceased to be a dignified creature, “noble in reason, infinite in faculty… in apprehension, like a god,” having instead been transformed into a slobbering, clownish freak. He is so excited about the notion of being wanted, and so fired up at the prospect of getting to have sex, that he will forfeit that which exalts him, and allow himself to be led around by the “nose” (the nose in this case obviously signifying an entirely different organ).

As the designated ambassador of the “manosphere,” this is the part where I’m supposed to call Nowicki a fag and dunk his head in the toilet, preferably while chanting “NOWICKI LIKES DICK! NOWICKI LIKES DICK!” to the jeering crowd.

Yet for some reason, I can’t do it.

As recently as two years ago, I would have scoffed at Nowicki’s philosophy of onanistic retreat. Indeed, I still think the gulf in our worldviews is in part a generational thing: the pessimism and angst of the Nomads (Generation X) versus the optimism and can-do attitude of the Heroes (Millennials). But Nowicki’s thesis transcends the usual trite arguments on sexual morality and addresses the fundamentally destructive nature of sex. No matter what form it takes, sex is the Anti-Life Equation, rending lives as effortlessly and ruthlessly as its purported antithesis, death. In the past two years alone, I’ve watched as lust—my own and that of those around me—has ended several of my friendships, shattered my heart multiple times, and even covered me in public shame.

There’s another angle to Nowicki’s ministrations. Our mutual friend Ann Sterzinger recently described him as a horror writer, master of a world where sex itself is Cthulhu, dragging us all into its maw. But there’s more to his oeuvre then anaphrodisia or GenX alienation: Andy Nowicki is the most quintessentially Catholic writer of our time. I don’t mean in some ham-handed theological way, especially considering that Nowicki’s tales of depucelated teens and emasculated husbands would horrify parishioners of any church.

Andy Nowicki’s works capture the essence of the Catholic soul.

At its heart, Catholicism is a tribe, not a religious denomination. Belief in God is optional; if you’re born a Catholic, you die a Catholic. Alienation and martyrdom is the core of the Catholic identity. Denounced as fifth columnists, moral degenerates, and racial untermenschen by the Protestants, to be Catholic is to be a pariah in your own nation. It’s having your life defined by pain and ostracism, to the point where you specifically begin seeking them out. A Catholic desires nothing more to be nailed to the cross, as John Dolan wrote in his poem “Waterloo”:

I could have done well at Waterloo
I said
As I drove them
In my selfless platonic way
Around the rainy curves
Seeing all the rainy sights;
I could’ve done well
I said,
I had no life
In the body
Not like these surfers
Twentieth-century types
They’d make terrible soldiers
They’ve had too much sports
Looking at him
Too much sex
Looking at her
They’re too attached to their limbs
They’d complain
If a surgeon started sawing their legs off
At a field hospital with no anaesthetic
Not me
Twerps are what you need
Twerps from a nineteeth-century
Preferably Catholic
Family if you want an army
That will stand its square
While the cannon furrows rip through it
Furrows consisting of your friends
I said

To be Catholic is to be against the world, to tear down golden calves no matter how suicidal the struggle. Every work of art produced by a Catholic from a Protestant-majority nation is defined by this self-abasing contrarianism. John Dolan revolted against seventies-era California cool with his own brand of virginal dorkiness. Camille Paglia savaged the lesbian orthodoxy of feminism by proclaiming her appreciation for men. John Kennedy Toole and Flannery O’Connor ridiculed the provincialism of the pre-Civil Rights South. Johnny Rotten sneered at England’s chattering classes, who thought they could escape the evil they wrought on the world.

Even Tolkien got in on the act: The Lord of the Rings is a quintessentially Catholic tale of a world in decline.

Andy Nowicki and Ann Sterzinger are the latest scions of Catholic literary iconoclasm. Sterzinger’s novels strike the root of American thanatophobia by attacking the worship of life itself, while Nowicki yanks up the rotten floorboards of lust to reveal the filth and vermin underneath. His works are a broadside not only against the mindless hedonism of secular society but the head-in-the-sand churlishness of its “traditionalist” opponents. He accepts the pretty lies of neither side in his quixotic pursuit of the truth.

And while he wasn’t born a Catholic, he embodies the Catholic soul so well that he had me fooled.

Since I’m obligated to keep this review from being a total hagiography, I’ll mention my two biggest problems with Confessions. The first is that its second part, “College Drama,” isn’t integrated very well into the book. “College Drama” concerns Nowicki’s tenure as an undergrad thespian, cast in the role of Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and expected to act out scenes of lust despite still being a virgin. While as darkly comic as the rest of the book, it feels tacked on and somewhat superfluous.

The second problem with Confessions is the cover art. Yeah yeah yeah, don’t judge a book by its cover, but the particular shade of red Nowicki is using combined with the white lettering makes my eyes twitch. The spartan design of Confessions is definitely going to hurt the book’s popularity, which is a shame considering its profound nature.

But really, don’t let the menstruation-colored cover or even your disagreement with Nowicki’s views keep you from buying this book. Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker is one of the most remarkable and important intellectual works to come out of this part of the Internet. It’s a brutally funny memoir, an honest psychological portrait, and a blistering statement of defiance all at once. Among a species ruled by base lusts, Andy Nowicki stands athwart history with his middle finger in the air.

Click here to buy Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker.

Read Next: This Malignant Mirage by Andy Nowicki

America can’t get enough of “true crime” stories. In our prim, proper Puritan nation, news reports and books about serial killers, child molesters and other disturbing criminals are a socially sanctioned form of pornography. We drool over biographies of the Son of Sam, savor the lurid details of how Ted Bundy sodomized the corpses of his victims, salivate over the blow-by-blow courtroom dramas and tearful testimonies.

But how many of us think about the victims of these crimes?

Oh sure, we know they exist, and we get off on reading about their suffering and torment. But do we truly grasp how these crimes destroy the lives of those around them? When you’re just a spectator in the peanut gallery, the fates of Stacy Moskowitz, Caryn Campbell and other victims of serial killers are an abstraction, no more real to us than fiction. But for the husbands, mothers, boyfriends, siblings and friends of these girls, that suffering is very much real, and it’s something that few will truly ever be able to get over.

Mikita Brottman’s Thirteen Girls is an oddity in “true crime” literature: a book that focuses on the victims rather than the perpetuators. While fictional, each short story is based off of a real victim of a serial killer, from the Son of Sam to Ted Bundy to the Zodiac killer. If you’re looking for a unique and bleak twist on the traditional true crime formula, Thirteen Girls is a must-read, as no other book accurately plumbs the emotional depths of murder, rape and loss.

The stories in Thirteen Girls are each told from the perspectives of the people affected by the murders of its titular protagonist. The first story, an account of how the Son of Sam killed Stacy Moskowitz and blinded her boyfriend, sets the book’s morbid tone. Brottman paints a landscape of emotional peaks and valleys, punctuated by the ringing gunfire of rape and death:

He fired through the passenger window, hitting Lisa first. Four shots. One went into Joey’s eye, blinding him forever. He could hear Lisa moaning, but could not see her. He was bleeding everywhere. He leaned on the car horn. When the police arrived they covered him with a blanket and lifted him out of the car. Lisa was lying across the front seat. She was conscious but she did not know what had happened. Thank God, she did not know she had been shot.

Brottman’s writing style slices into you with the cold precision of a coroner autopsying a prostitute. She details death and heartbreak with clinical precision, giving you just enough to become emotionally invested in each story while retaining her distance from the fallout. Each tale in Thirteen Girls is brief enough that you can blaze through individual stories in about ten minutes or so, propelled by Brottman’s minimalist prose and cutting reports. To aid you in matching each story to the real-life victim it was based on, there’s a handy appendix at the end of the book.

Indeed, the most striking thing about Thirteen Girls is that the serial killers who are the focus of the true crime genre barely figure in it at all. The focus remains on the victims, each story probing their identities and personalities from every conceivable angle. One of the most gut-wrenching stories, “Alice,” is told from the perspective of a shrink analyzing the friend of one of the Hillside Strangler’s victims. Brottman engenders a violent emotional reaction in the reader by reciting the facts in a stern, detached fashion:

Often, B would miss her appointment due to undefined illnesses. On one occasion, she had an allergic reaction to her eyelash extensions (“my eyes were itching all night, and when I woke up I looked like a racoon”). Sometimes she would express discomfort in my office. For example, I had a picture of my children on my office desk, and she commented that they were “evil-looking.” She observed more than once that there was a “bad energy” coming from the therapy couch, which, she observed, always felt “cold.” She would often talk about ghosts.

Brottman’s nihilistic perspective will no doubt turn off a great number of readers. Unlike most mawkish “true crime” writers, she doesn’t even attempt to wring a moral out of these stories. That’s because there isn’t one. Thirteen Girls depicts the cruel randomness of human existence, where a young girl’s life can be snuffed out with no reason or purpose. There’s no God to punish the guilty and reward the innocent, no karma to ensure that evildoers get what’s coming to them, no mythical force that provides purpose to this cursed existence. There is only probability, our meat puppet lives dictated by a toss of the invisible dice.

And it’s that reality that makes the torment of Thirteen Girls’ subjects all the more poignant.

That’s why you owe it to yourself to read Mikita Brottman’s book. If you need some intellectual ipecac to counteract the effects of traditional true crime writing, Thirteen Girls will put your head in the toilet in record time. If you enjoy bleak, dark tales of rape and murder, Brottman’s short story collection will also satisfy you. As a depth charge plopped into the sea of the moral smut store that is the “true crime” genre, Thirteen Girls succeeds in every respect.

Click here to buy Thirteen Girls.

Read Next: Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova by Neil Skywalker

How exactly does someone adhere to a philosophy that negates that person’s very existence?

It’s easy to laugh at, say, Dave Chappelle’s depiction of a blind black man who joins the KKK, but antinatalism isn’t a comedy skit or some goth kid’s attempt to intellectualize his angst: it’s a carefully thought-out philosophy. Antinatalism’s central belief is this: life is awful and we should stop trying to perpetuate this agony by having children. No bombs, no genocides, no cyanide in the water supply: just cease procreating and let the human race quietly fade into the history books.

The instinctual response to something like this is “Well gee, if your life is so bad, why don’t you stop whining and just kill yourself?”

Strangely enough, that wasn’t my instinctual response. My first thoughts upon stumbling across Jim Crawford’s blog were along the lines of “Welp, THIS movement isn’t going anywhere.” Just look around you. The only people who are using birth control and getting their tubes tied are the intelligent, primarily white middle- and upper-classes: the proles are breeding like flies in a litter box. It’s not simply that the natural aristocracy are the only ones who can grasp antinatalism, it’s that they’re the only ones with the wherewithal to put it into practice.

Just a few days before I picked up Confessions of an Antinatalist, for example, I had to watch yet another nauseating specimen of the lower classes stinking up my visage. In this case, it was a teenaged white single mom wearing pajama bottoms and smelling of day-old BO, dragging along a screaming little brat who kept trying to swipe candy off the cash register shelves. “I want the Reesies Peesies!” the little turd whined. “Wait until we go to Wegmans,” the slut responded. “BUT I WANT THE REESIES PEESIES!” the turd demanded. “OMG,” the slut sighed, taking the Reeses’ Pieces and ringing them up with her EBT card.

And that’s not a literary flourish: she actually said oh em gee, because using complete words is apparently too much work for the underclass these days.

Reading Confessions of an Antinatalist, if it doesn’t convince you of the pointlessness of human existence, will at least get you to recognize that nothing short of mandatory sterilization will solve the human infestation. Part philosophical treatise, part memoir, Jim Crawford’s book is a thoughtful deconstruction of the basest urges of organic life: the desire to fuck and procreate. While I’m unlikely to get a vasectomy anytime soon, Confessions of an Antinatalist made me rethink my inner desire to have children.

And the memoir section of Confessions of an Antinatalist goes a long way towards establishing Crawford’s credibility on the subject. Consuming the first half of the book, Crawford goes through his upbringing in seventies California, his membership in a cult, his marriage and children, his stint with homelessness, and his long, arduous journey to the present day. Interspaced between his musings are discussions of writings by Schopenhauer and David Benatar, bolstering Crawford’s point that life is utterly pointless:

The next few months were bad. I managed to hock a few things. A shotgun. A camera. A gold necklace I’d bought my wife for one of our happier anniversaries in the misty past. Maybe there was some other shit. I’m not sure. I lived on dollar hamburgers and chicken sandwiches from Carl’s Jr. I spent most of the daytime hours in parks, cleaning up in the public restrooms, writing depressing poetry and multi-paged suicidal diatribes where I blamed everything and everyone but myself. I’d pitch my journal scraps into a trash can at the end of each day. It was summer and bejesus hot, and my feet and ankles swelled up due to my uncontrolled high blood pressure to the point where all I could wear were unbuckled sandals. Sometimes I’d park under the mall parking structure and read old paperbacks until it got dark.

Crawford’s writing has a learned-but-folksy feel to it, like a more morbid version of Fred Reed. His prose is simple, lean and unpretentious, whether he’s talking about his health issues or discussing his interpretation of Buddhist philosophy. While the first half of the book feels somewhat aimless, with Crawford constantly flipping between heavier discussions of antinatalism with stories from his past, it works quite well in setting up the second half of the book, where things get deep.

The end of the book is dedicated to Crawford’s own philosophy of antinatalism (which is surprisingly short) as well as responses to his critics. To put it simply, life frankly isn’t all that great. It’s a long, arduous struggle of brief pleasures and extended pains, and condemning other people to it through childbirth is one of the most evil acts we can commit:

Well? Why MUST they be? That’s the question far too few of these guys ask themselves. Why is it so important to fill up every future moment with people? Before the first hominid stood up to get a better look over the savannah, was there something fundamentally missing in the universe? If tonight we all went to bed and just didn’t wake up, what difference would it make? We are temporal creatures living on a speck of dust in a microscopic corner of one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. What is so crucial about our particular existence that we feel compelled to roll children out of their carnal slumber, slap them around for a while, feed them, fuck them, pull them through knotholes, blindfold them, turn them round and round, then send them back off to find their beds? It makes no sense!

That’s the inherent problem with antinatalism: it’s a rational philosophy aimed at an irrational species. Strip away the veneer of civilization and you’ll quickly see that we’re not too far removed from the apes. A little tremor in the foundation of society and we’ll be raping each other and slitting throats in short order. The drive to procreate, to blast that little bit of DNA inside a woman’s snatch to create yet another hairless lump of flesh, is one that no logical argument will ever be able to dent.

Humans are just meat puppets full of hormones and base impulses.

Nonetheless, there’s something beautiful in the doomed struggle of antinatalists, in the same way that there was something beautiful about the Alamo. Crawford and his compadres are a tiny, outgunned minority with no chance of victory, yet they fight on anyway, convinced of the righteousness of their cause. And as the zombies climb over the fort walls, drooling their chants of “Choooooose liffffffe…” and “Liffffffeeeeee issssss greeeeeeaaaaaat…”, you can just imagine Crawford firing slugs into their skulls up until the bitter end.

For this reason alone, you should read Confessions of an Antinatalist: it’s a fair, logical and darkly humorous treatment of one of organic life’s most basic urges. While it probably won’t make you pick up a gun and join Crawford at the fort, it might just result in you reconsidering your life choices. Planet Earth may belong to the zombies and their idiot progeny, but by God, they’ll never take away our brains.

Click here to buy Confessions of an Antinatalist.

Read Next: Confessions of a Reluctant Hater by Greg Johnson

Ah yes, the original. The big kahuna. The pamphlet that killed hundreds of millions of people, drove half the world’s countries to economic ruin, and forms the foundation of the ideology rotting America from within. The turd at the bottom of the planet’s biggest pile of bullshit.

Okay, that’s a little too harsh.

The Communist Manifesto is worth reading just because; as a foundational document of our modern world, you need to understand it in order to understand America. The other shocking thing I noticed about re-reading the book is that Marx, as wrong as he was, had a far better grip on reality then the hysterical crybabies who make up the modern left. Indeed, reading the Manifesto lets you better understand the psychopathology of leftists.

It only took a century and a half, but Marxism has finally reached the base of the demographic pyramid.

Mind you, actually reading the Manifesto is a minor struggle on its own. From an artistic standpoint, Karl Marx has to be the worst writer to ever exert any influence on philosophy and literature. His prose has all the life of a asphyxiated catfish, flopping about uselessly and causing your eyes to glaze over with every sentence:

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

It’s tempting to blame this on translation issues, but I read a completely different translation when I was in college and I still had difficulty forcing my way through the book. The Manifesto is saved in part by the fact that it’s short, barely forty pages; any longer and no one would have bothered with it.

Though the ineptness of Marx and Engels’ writing might be a good thing given all the people that Marxism ended up killing: had they a speck of talent between them, the human race would have been driven to extinction.

As I mentioned before, the Manifesto is interesting in that it presents a clearer vision of reality than modern leftists do. For example, Marx admits that in a capitalist, transactional economy, labor is a commodity like everything else, subject to the laws of supply and demand. If you increase the supply of labor, you lower demand and the price (i.e. wages) by extension:

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed–a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Try getting a social justice warrior to admit that today. All you’ll get is hysterical screaming: “HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT THINGS THEY’RE PEOPLE IT’S NOT FAIR LIVING WAGE NOW!!!!!!11”

But as I mentioned, The Communist Manifesto is more valuable for what it says about the left, not its political program. Pretty much all the pathologies of leftists—opposition to generalizations and stereotypes, “non-judgmentalism,” and a nauseating confidence in their beliefs in the face of reality—exist in the Manifesto in larval form. For example, Marx was an early feminist, and he rails against the injustice of capitalist patriarchy in the book’s second half:

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

This is absolutely ridiculous, but it’s the exact same style of argumentation feminists use when railing against patriarchy and traditional sex roles. They’ll bring up every obscure Amazon tribe, every no-name cult you’ve never heard of as evidence that gender is a social construct, oblivious to the fact that none of these matriarchal or egalitarian utopias ever accomplished anything and have always been rolled over by their patriarchal neighbors. Similarly, Marx viewed the family unit of mid-1800’s Europe as an artificial creation of capitalism, oblivious to the fact that the family pre-dated not only capitalism but Europe itself.

Every single nation or civilization in history that did anything of importance, whether based in Europe, Asia or the Americas, was based on the exact same foundation: patriarchal, father-led families.

The nicest thing I can say about Karl Marx is that he was a man for his time. Exempting his fetish for open marriage and sexual promiscuity, communism makes a certain kind of sense… from a 19th century perspective. Unfortunately, the world has left economic Marxism behind. As James Burnham showed us in The Managerial Revolution, modern society is too complex and involved to be controlled by people as dim and talentless as the proles. Marxism is an undead ideology, adapted for a world that is long gone.

It’s too bad that Marx’s acolytes are still around and still screwing things up for the rest of us.

That’s why, as deluded and poorly-written as The Communist Manifesto is, it’s a necessary book. Without it, the vagaries of modern society make no sense at all. Marx’s shadow looms large over us, and his ideas, while moronic and destructive, appeal to people for a reason. Reading the Manifesto lets you figure out why.

Click here to buy The Communist Manifesto.

Read Next: The Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad

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